Hot Fuzz

by Scott

 
I’ll keep this one short, because there really isn’t too much to say other than Hot Fuzz is the most enjoyable movie so far this year, and I don’t recall laughing as much in a theater as I did during Hot Fuzz since…well, Shaun of the Dead I guess.  The team of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost have done it again, this time taking the piss out of the action genre, with a little bit of slasher movie satire thrown in there as well.  Pegg and Frost are shaping up to be one of the best on-screen comedy duos out there.  Their chemistry is amazing and is probably the key ingredient to making these films work so well.

All you really need to know going in is basically summed up in the trailer.  Save everything else for when you see it – the less you know, the better.  Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a London cop who is 400% more efficient than the rest of the force, thus causing them to reassign him to the quiet country town of Sandford for making them look bad.  Naturally, there is more to the town than meets the eye and Angel starts to expose its dark undercurrent with humorous and action-packed results.  Once in the town, he is also paired up with Danny Butterman (Frost), the town inspector’s son, who is tired of the boring aspects of being a cop and longs for it to be as exciting and crazy as movies like Point Break and Bad Boys 2.

The film takes its time building up, but it is still hilarious while doing so.  But the set up has a point.  If you remember in Shaun of the Dead, about 65% of what happens early in the movie comes back into play later on somehow.  Well, in Hot Fuzz that figure is more in the 90-95% range.  Almost everything sets up something, and I can’t remember another movie ever relying so much on callbacks to previous events.  Luckily, it’s necessary to the story and never feels like a cop out (no pun intended).  And the pay off is really worth it, leading up to what is possibly one of the most fulfilling, absurd action-packed final acts ever put to film. 

I caught a blurb from another review, discussing why the type of parody that Wright and Pegg are doing works so much better than American parody movies like Scary Movie.  He argued that it was because they actually work all of the humor and references around a tightly constructed story and well-written characters.  I would have to agree with this and it just goes to show that sometimes it seems like Americans have absolutely no idea what they’re doing when it comes to comedy.  You can’t just string a bunch of gags together, you need to have a great story as well. 

It also helps that those involved with Hot Fuzz are extremely talented.  Pegg is not only a great comedian, but a terrific actor as well.  The same goes for Frost and the rest of the cast, which includes Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, and Paddy Considine.  All of this. combined with Edgar Wright’s insane visual style, which uses the camera in ways that are sometimes just as funny as the actors.  So yeah, go see Hot Fuzz.  It’s wild, delightfully over-the-top, and absolutely hysterical.  It’s probably the first time in a while that I want to go out and see a film again as soon as possible.