Pun Salad

Gosh, I thought I would like this more. I really wanted to like this more. Netflix thought I would love it. But I kept waiting for it to be funnier, and it never was. Maybe I was just in a post-Christmas foul mood. But I watched a Big Bang Theory rerun just before this, and laughed all the way through that, so…

It stars Simon Pegg, who also co-wrote the script. Directed and co-written by Edgar Wright. Pegg and Wright also collaborated on Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, both of which I liked a lot better.

Pegg plays Gary, a not-particularly-likeable alcoholic loser. He recalls fondly the glory days of 20 years previous, when he and his school buddies set off to crawl a dozen pubs in the sleepy English town of Newton Haven. They failed.

So Gary gets the idea of reuniting the group, and successfully completing the crawl. He manages to get everyone together by deception and browbeating. Things get a little more interesting when Sam (Rosamund Pike) shows up; she's the sister of one of the group members, another has always been infatuated with her, and in a moment of very poor judgment, she once had a sordid lavatory encounter with Gary.

But something's wrong: the town's inhabitants are much more placid than before; many don't seem to have aged; and (whoa) they turn out to be androids surreptitiously placed by an alien civilization looking to bring peace and harmony to Terra.

Sounds promising. But it just never gets very funny.

Trivia: as Hot Fuzz had an ex-Bond actor, Timothy Dalton, so does this: Pierce Brosnan. (And of course Rosamund Pike was a villianess in a Bond movie.)