Hot Fuzz (14 February 2007)
directed by Edgar Wright
starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine, Timothy Dalton, Bill Nighy, Billie Whitelaw, Edward Woodward, Bill Bailey, David Bradley, Adam Buxton, Olivia Colman, Ron Cook, Kenneth Cranham, Julia Deakin, Kevin Eldon, Martin Freeman, Paul Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Steve Coogan, Peter Jackson
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MPAA rating: Studio: Big Talk Productions, Ingenious Film Partners, Studio Canal, Working Title Films Script: Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg Music: David Arnold Running time: 121 minutes Tags: Action; Comedy; decapitation; England; London; murder; Mystery; pistols; police officers; rifles; riot gear Tactical strength: [7/10]
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for violent content including some graphic images, and language
Hot Fuzz opens with a montage of London Police Officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) and his many accomplishments on the force -- no, in the service ("force" has too negative a connotation). Angel knows every rule, regulation, and law by heart, and has an arrest rate 400% higher than his fellow officers. But to the Chief Inspector (BillNighy ), Angel's statistics make the rest of the force look bad. To get rid of angel, the Chief Inspector promotes Angel to sergeant and transfers him to the quiet country town ofSandford, where Angel gets assigned to a new partner Danny (Nick Frost), the son of the Sanford Inspector (Jim Broadbent), and takes on assignments like speed traps, chasing runaway swans, and citing a man for cutting down a neighbor's hedge.
But soon after Angel's arrival, people start dying. First a truly awful actor who put on an abysmal version of Romeo and Juliet dies with his mistress in an auto accident (no, not an "accident" a collision -- "accident"implies that no one is at fault) that decapitated both the actors. Next, the richest man in the community dies when supposedly he accidentally left the gas running on his stove. The Sandford medical examiner confirms all the deaths occurred by accident, but Angel suspects murder. His prime suspect, the local grocer Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton), has made incriminating remarks to Angel before every death.
Angel can't convince the Inspector or the detectives to investigate the murders, so he takes on the case himself, with the willing assistance of Danny, who reveres Angel for all his exciting police work. To tell much more would spoil the few secrets that Angel uncovers, but the final act does end with combination chase sequence and gun battle that provides a lot of noise, but not many bodies.
Like Pegg and Wright's earlier film Sean of the Dead pays tribute to the genre of zombie films, Hot Fuzz pays comedic tribute to the crime story genre (with some tributes to Westerns thrown in for good measure). If you haven't watched enough of the crime story genre, the DVD provides a trivia version that overlays interesting facts about the filming of the movie, all the tie-ins to other movies, and even points out all lines that foreshadow events later in the film.
I didn't find Hot Fuzz as riotously funny as Shaun of the Dead. Hot Fuzz has much more subtle humor, mostly irony created by the totally metropolitan Angel trying to fit in to a small town lifestyle. But Hot Fuzz has a much more intelligent plot than Shaun of the Dead. Angel has a real mystery to solve, and the crime elements do enough to keep your interest in place of the morezany humor of Pegg's previous films.
Pegg and Frost continue to play amazingly well against each other, and the rest of the big names in the cast create an atmosphere of mystery and collusion that support the more serious side of the plot. But don't take Hot Fuzz too seriously or the corny ending will seem out of place.
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