« No Huxley for This Movie | Home | Still Made With Brominated Vegetable Oil »
Nick of the Force
By bukkhead | August 19, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘HOT FUZZ’
Written by Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg
Directed by Edgar Wright
Rated R
121 mins.
Let’s face it, Hot Fuzz is the sequel to Shaun of the Dead. The characters are different, of course, and the stories are in no way connected. But you’ve got the same actors, writers, director, and editing technique… to go into Hot Fuzz without having seen Shaun of the Dead will mean missing a few things.
Not that the movie doesn’t stand up on its own. It does and does well. Nick Angel is a London super-cop, serving with distinction, earning several citations, and possessing an exemplary arrest record. Which is why he has to be shipped off to the cozy, quiet hamlet of Sandford, since he’s making the rest of London’s finest look less than fine. Once he’s there, he’s witness to a series of “accidents” that makes him very sure there’s something inauthentic about this idyllic village’s apparent calm and tranquility.
So Simon Pegg plays Nick Angel entirely different from the way he played Shaun, and Nick Frost plays Butterman entirely different from the way he played Shaun’s best mate Ed. Nevertheless, this is still a buddy picture. You still have the do-right main character, with his tragic flaw, encumbered but eventually saved by his sidekick. You still have a so-called “unlikely” pair facing a mob of enemies in a do-or-die fight to the death. I don’t want to give anything away, but there are other similarities as well.
Writers Wright and Pegg are obviously making movies to have fun, and they want you to see how much fun they’re having—they want you to have as much fun as they are. And this means not shying away from going over the top at every opportunity. Nick’s status as a super-cop is so incredible as to seem cartoonish, or comic-bookish if you will. Sandford is stuffed with every small-English town cliché you can think of, and the sedate police “force” there is populated just as you would expect it.
In this way, Hot Fuzz is to action films what Shaun of the Dead is to zombie films—it takes the formula, mines it for stereotypes, puts the British spin on it, and makes it funny. This makes for a rather satisfying film experience, and sets one up for instance fandom of Wright and Pegg. (Not unlike Broken Lizard Productions, who gave us their treatment of cops in Super Troopers and the teen slasher flick in Club Dread).
Of course none of this matters without style, and fans of Shaun will instantly recognize the fingerprint on Hot Fuzz in the editing department, in scene transitions rendered with a series of superfast cut-and-zoom shots. Chris Dickens is listed as the films’ editor, so I’m going to assume that’s his doing, though I’m sure as the director, Wright also had a hand in it. But even beyond editing, there’s the buddy humor, and as I said, the over-the-top treatment of each element. Watching Hot Fuzz (Or Shaun for that matter), nothing is left out, and you get what you pay for.
Topics: Movies | No Comments »