Years and years ago it felt like I was a lone voice of dissent. Spaced is utter dogshit I would tell people. It’s just a series of film references. Yes, you’ve watched Star Wars a million times and now you’re referencing Jedi mind tricks. Oh, what a fucking genius you are.

Colour me pleasantly surprised when Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz turned out to be rather good. Maybe Spaced was just a painful learning exercise. From now on, everything’s going to be great.

Yeah, bollocks to that. The World’s End is a painfully disappointing film. It feels like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. It’s Shaun of the Dead’s pasty, unfunny, twin brother. So much of the film falls flat.

Right from the off you know you’re in trouble. The film begins with a painfully unfunny introduction to the main characters. The writing is plodding, heavy-handed and stale, and all the visual pyrotechnics in the world aren’t going to save it. Yes, here are some kids who were friends at school and then they went out drinking. It feels like the film takes ten minutes to convey this information. It’s a completely unnecessary sequence.

For what it’s worth, the story focuses on a fucking loser played by a rather emaciated and unhealthy looking Simon Pegg. He’s an alcoholic who has never moved on from his teenage years. He wants to complete a pub crawl comprising of twelve pubs in his childhood town. But he wants to do this with all of his old friends. Needless to say, they’ve all moved on with their lives. We’ve got a car salesmen, an estate agent, a business executive etc. Will they join Gary’s (Pegg) quest to reach The World’s End and down a twelfth pint? What the fuck do you think?

But they’re not going to do it before some desperate padding and unfunny attempts at comedy. One-by-one Gary has to convince his old friends to join him, leading to some horribly repetitive shit. With each successive scene, Gary comes over as increasingly sad and pathetic. And not in an amusing way. He’s no Withnail. He doesn’t have any funny lines. He doesn’t have any amusing behaviour. There’s no wit, there’s no edge and no bite. It’s just Simon Pegg horribly overacting as he tries to wring some juice out of his hapless script.

Once they finally start the pub crawl, we again have to put up with annoying repetition. Ask for drinks, same shot of pints being pulled, cut to characters chugging it down, cue a little bit of squabbling about the past. By the time you get to the third pub, it begins to dawn on you that you’re going to have to put up with this another nine times. Hand me a bottle of vodka and pour it into my eyeballs, this is going to be a long ride.

Of course, The World’s End has a twist, but again it feels recycled. Shaun of the Dead had zombies so The World’s End has...alien androids. Sounds like it could be amusing, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. It just feels like warmed up leftovers. Oh, so before we were killing zombies? Now we get to kill androids that have blue blood! See what we did there? See how we made it totally different and unique?

The first attack on Gary, by a pack of chavs, is ridiculously choreographed. Gary gets into a scuffle with a kid and then does a Rock Bottom into a urinal and decapitates the teenager. Okay, so drunk Gary can execute a perfect wrestling move? And of course he has no idea that this kid is a robot. So he legitimately thinks it would be a good idea to do this move through a urinal which, if the kid were human, would probably kill him? Look, I know logic isn’t high on the agenda of this film, but the characters in this movie are so stupid that it beggars belief. And after this, Gary’s friends and a whole bunch of alien robots join together for a huge fight with more ridiculous choreography. Apparently everyone here should be wrestling in WWE. Everyone’s flying around like Rey Mysterio. There are gorilla presses and back breakers and flying elbows. And it also seems like the alien robot kids are made of glass, because they shatter with just the slightest impact. One kid gets broken in half when he gets thrown against a sink and another shatters when he gets elbow dropped in the head. High technology but terrible construction. Are they are a bunch of iPhones?

You’d think that after this attack, Gary would maybe decide to go home and forget the pub crawl. But seeing as he’s insanely single-minded, we have to carry on with the arduous endeavor. On and on it goes as the group debates whether so-and-so is a robot or not.

Eventually all hell breaks lose and the androids are chasing Gary through the streets. When he reaches the final pub, The World’s End, he’s interrupted and lead to a secret chamber where it’s revealed that alien androids have already infiltrated the world and that they’re responsible for all the advancements in technology. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everything then goes kaboom and the film ends with an apocalyptic hellscape.

What makes the ending thoroughly amazing is that it kind of ends as an action movie. Most of the characters are doing their best to make the most of the end of the world, but Gary, ever the child, is transformed almost into an action hero. He walks into a bar with some android friends, who are not trusted by anyone, seeing as they kind of helped to destroy everything, and then draws a sword when a bartender refuses to serve the androids. It’s thoroughly bizarre and quite depressing when you think about it. So the world has ended and yet you’re still some ridiculous cartoon. You’re still a child. You’re now living some post-apocalyptic, comic book fantasy. Please take this movie away. Please eject it violently from the rectum of the film landscape.

The trouble with the British police is that they're not very sexy. Just compare them to the Americans. The Americans get guns; we get truncheons. The Americans wear caps; we wear helmets that resemble breasts. The Americans get NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice; we get Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars and The Bill. There's an imbalance there, one that Hot Fuzz fully recognises.

The beginning of Hot Fuzz presents us with a cop called Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) who has the best arrest record in his station (400% better to be exact). But while in America this would be a cause for admiration and pats on the back, here it's bad form. He's making everyone else look bad. So therefore he's sent to the country, to a place that has no crime and a place that has won the village of the year competition.

One of the funniest scenes occurs quite early on when Angel is new to the town. He goes to the pub and slowly realises that most of the drinkers are underage. Unable to switch off and let it pass, he begins to interrogate the kids. 'When's your birthday?' he asks one youth. '22nd February.' 'What year?' 'Every year.' 'Get out.' I love the kid's sarcasm and Angel's disgusted reaction. And then even better, he asks the same question to a geeky, bespectacled kid. Rather than make up a phoney date, the kid can only squeal in horror. He's then thrown out. It's silly humour, but it works.

Another silly piece of humour I enjoyed occurs even earlier than the pub scene. After being transferred, Angel visits his girlfriend, who's a crime scene investigator. Therefore, when he visits her as she's working, she's wearing a white jumpsuit and mask. 'Jeanine, I've been transferred,' he says. 'I'm moving away for a while.' 'I'm not Jeanine,' comes the reply, in a man's voice. And then Angel, after having the real Jeanine pointed out to him, repeats the dialogue. It's a piece of Naked Gun humour (a film that I love).

Even sillier, though, and generating an even bigger laugh from me, is a late scene between Angel and PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost, funny as ever). It's an earnest turning point scene, a scene that happens in virtually every buddy cop film. In this case, Danny is trying to get his pal to leave the village so that he doesn't get hurt. 'Go back to Lond-on,' he says. Words just can't do it justice, but I honestly thought Frost's line delivery was the best thing in the film. I also love the line: 'He's not Judge Judy and executioner'.

On the other hand, some of the broader humour doesn't work quite as well. Fair enough, it's brilliant when Angel dropkicks a shotgun-wielding granny, but the shoot-out scenes lose their charm pretty quickly. Maybe it's because they're too similar to recent action films they're mimicking. I just can't stand that jerky, over-edited style of action. It gives me brain ache.

Having said this, the action does recover towards the end with one of the main villains (excellently played by Timothy Dalton) getting speared through the chin by the spire of a model church. It's magnificently over the top.

Also worthy of big laughs are the numerous killings. With people getting decapitated, stabbed in the throat with shears, and best of all, spiked in the head by church masonry, you have enough blood to fill a dozen horror films. But while it's a surprise how violent Hot Fuzz is (much more so than the current brand of watered down action flicks), it's a pleasant surprise. I'm personally all for heads being exploded in geysers of blood. There should be more masonry-related violence.

But back to the film's silly humour, just as funny as these blood-filled 'big' moments is a tiny moment when Angel and Danny are talking to their rivals in the CID. They're arguing and squabbling and the two detectives move out of frame, but then Paddy Considine moves his head back into the shot. It's one of those things that has to be seen, but it's one of the best bits in the film.

However, as good as the film is, I do have to say that there are sections where the film drags. Occasionally there are large gaps between laughs. Part of this is because the film actually has a plot – from time to time there's quite a bit of exposition - and part of it is because the film feels a little long. You feel it could have been tightened.

But none of this seriously affected my enjoyment of the film. And it's also worth noting that behind all the wonderfully dumb jokes and bad taste humour, there's a bit of social commentary. The village society in this film, after all, kills anyone that doesn't conform to their standards of behaviour – gypsies, teenagers and hoodies are popular targets. Therefore the film seems to be slyly attacking the parochial attitudes of middle class England. For all the overt violence of London you have a more insidious type of violence existing in certain parts of the country and amongst certain people. But whether this message makes an impact is debatable. There's too much other stuff going on, most of it involving guns, decapitation and silly one-liners...which is fine by me.