Film Review: Hot Fuzz
Hot Fuzz pokes fun at buddy flicks with shameless abandon
The advent of the movie Super Cop began with Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, which starred Clint Eastwood, as an outsider fighting crime while rebelling against the rapidly decaying established order. The super cop character begat the buddy cop films such as Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour and the jewel of idiotic cinematic partnerships, Bad Boys. These fictional lawmen were cut from a cloth that was impervious to evildoers, dim-witted bosses and fusillades of badly aimed bullets. With every tried and true genre comes forth those who would subject it to good natured ridicule; and to quote Carly Simon, “Nobody does it better” than the team of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. In case those names don’t ring a bell, they are the lads that put a droll twist on brain eating zombie movies with the imaginative Shaun of the Dead. They are back with a frenetic vengeance with Hot Fuzz, a film that pokes fun at the aforementioned buddy flicks with shameless abandon.
Pegg, who played the ne’er-do-well turned hero in Shaun of the Dead returns as protagonist Sergeant Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz. Far from idle in this story, our hero is so proficient at crime fighting, that his amazing arrest statistics become an embarrassment to his superiors and coworkers on the London police force. In a humorous sequence, his unyielding bosses (Martin Freeman and Bill Nighy) reward Angel’s dedication and skill with a promotion and by shipping him off against his will to the sleepy village of Sandford. However, during his first evening in town, the sergeant manages to clear out a local pub of under age drinkers, round up some mischief makers and arrest a drunk driver who turns out to be his new partner PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), who also happens to be the son of Chief Inspector Butterman (Jim Broadbent). Naturally, the seemingly lax Inspector informs veteran Angel that the village is crime free and that his new challenge will require not going crazy with boredom. In between babysitting school kids and hunting for a slippery escaped swan, Angel and his new protégé manage to catch a quick footed shoplifter, give a speeding ticket to a local theatre director and arrest a farmer with enormous cache of weapons including a rusty sea mine that fills the empty police evidence locker.
Though there has not been a murder in the village for more than twenty years, people began dying in strange ways including an auto accident decapitation, an exploding mansion and the local news reporter being impaled by a church steeple. In a series of police film cliché’s, the sergeant’s colleagues dismiss his theory that the mysterious deaths are connected and reeking of foul play. Undaunted, Angel finally convinces Inspector Butterman to confront suspicious local Supermarket owner Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton) after he outlines a sinister land development scheme. Though the insidious plot seems to offer playful homage to Polanski’s Chinatown, it is far more humorous when Angel discovers that the real reason behind the killings is far simpler. It is the handiwork of the Neighborhood Watch Association, whose members include every leading citizen in Sanford with a mission to eliminate any undesirable people (including a mime called the Human Statue) who they believe stand in the way of their town winning the “Village of the Year” award.
As a fan of their last effort, I was looking forward to the subsequent pairing of Pegg and Frost, who are once again are firing on all cylinders. In case you didn’t get to see Grindhouse, a high-octane tribute to 70’s drive-in movie schlock, I highly recommend that you don’t miss this energetic lampoon of law and order archetypes. With the clever use of heavy-handed foreshadowing and straight faced distilling of formula storylines, the actors and filmmakers adeptly tread the line of satire and plotline in creating genre parody.
HOT FUZZ
Directed by: Edgar Wright
Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Bill Nighy, Timothy Dalton