2007 / 121 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

I had always thought the love of action movies was a decidedly American thing. But the existence of “Hot Fuzz” proves me wrong. Then again, why shouldn’t British people and all other people, for that matter, enjoy the brand of mayhem that American film studios seem especially great at serving up? The French produce a lot of kinky, sex-filled films about relationships. The British produce a lot of handsomely mounted costume dramas (and, truth be told, bizarre, off-the-cuff comedies). India loves making musicals. America’s number one cinematic import has always involved car chases and things blowing up real good. But, when you stop to think it over, it makes perfect sense. Who doesn’t enjoy the occasional explosion? Some nation had to fill that niche.

Even though we are the number one exporter of action movies, I don’t think we’ve managed to produce an action movie as gleeful and exhilarating as “Hot Fuzz” in years. And we certainly haven’t produced any that were half so clever or half so curiously satisfying.

“Hot Fuzz” focuses on Nicolas Angel (played with flinty reserve by Simon Pegg). Angel is London’s top cop, with an arrest rate that’s four hundred percent higher than any other cop on the force. The problem is that Angel is too good. He’s making every other cop in London look like a slacker. Instead of pushing the other officers to work harder, Angel’s superiors decide to shunt him off to a small town in the country, safely out of the way and out of mind. Angel arrives at the sleepy, Somerset town of Sandford and is immediately driven crazy by the overly accommodating and unprofessional manner of its resident police force. They turn a blind eye to underage drinking and even drunk driving. They eat ice cream and cake while on duty. They also seem all too eager to categorize the escalating number of grisly deaths in town as accidents, while Angel and his well-meaning but incompetent partner (the delightful Nick Frost) begin to suspect foul play. Is Sandford less sleepy than it seems? Would there be much of a movie otherwise?

The great thrill of “Hot Fuzz” is how well the filmmakers know the conventions and clichés of action films and how playfully they work within those conventions while simultaneously turning them on their heads. Director Edgar Wright and his collaborators obviously spent much of their teenage years watching “Die Hard” and “Lethal Weapon”, just like most teenagers on this side of the pond, and “Hot Fuzz” seems less like a spoof than a loving tribute to the whole genre. There are plenty of homages to other films littered throughout this one, but the film works them in organically so that they never stand out like a sore thumb, as such references do in other films. The movie can reference lines, scenes and sequences in the films that have come before it and still remain a unique creation all its own, full of inventive moments and wonderfully realized characters. What I love about the work Wright and Pegg put into movies like this one and their previous effort, “Shaun of the Dead”, is that they make films that never sacrifice the coolness of their situations in order to be funny. “Hot Fuzz” has moments of genuine suspense and some excellent character development, even among the secondary characters, without sacrificing a single laugh. For this simple trick alone, I’d have to count Edgar Wright as the best comedic director working today. The films he and Simon Pegg construct are alive with the simple, giddy thrill of making movies. They don’t make spoofs; they make examples of genres so excellently thought out that one laughs with a sense of recognition. Though, of course, there’s something ingeniously funny about all this over-the-top action taking place in the sleepy English West Country. It’s like Wright and company have managed to mix “Lethal Weapon” with the original “Wicker Man”.

Wright brings a distinct visual flair to the film that is lacking in most comedies. The dialogue he and Pegg have written is excellent, but Wright backs it up with clever camera angles and snappy editing. The filmmakers have great fun mocking the whip-flash editing style of most modern blockbusters, but they don’t go so far overboard as to make it annoying (as movies like “The Bourne Supremacy” and “Bad Boys” have done). The actors contribute some excellent work as well. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are an excellent duo here. They capture the yin/yang of a great mismatched cop team: Pegg is hard-nosed and by-the-book, Frost is a lovable schlub who seems to have joined the force because he wanted his life to more closely resemble the action movies he watches in every bit of his spare time. They also subtly play with the homoerotic overtones inherent in action movie partnerships. As the film progresses, their partnership plays out almost like a love story. It’s a brilliant touch. Wright has surrounded these performances with plenty of other great ones, from a multitude of great English character actors. Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward (the Equalizer himself!), Paul Freeman (Belloq!), and Patrick Wilson (best known as the villain from “The Mask of Zorro” and “Lethal Weapon 3”…and whom I didn’t even know was British) all play their characters to the hilt and help maintain the subtle balance that Wright and the others have created.

But what about the action? This is, after all, an action movie, right? Well, the explosions are satisfyingly large and loud. There’s some wonderful gore (particularly a bit involving a church spire…yeesh) and the shootouts are staged with evident glee. It is clear from the gusto of these scenes that Wright and Pegg have wanted to film shootouts and car chases for a long, long time. There’s even a wonderful climactic fist fight full of visual references to the first “Lethal Weapon”.

“Grindhouse” was fun, but “Hot Fuzz” is even better. It’s an homage to an era of action filmmaking that, sadly, seems to have come to an end. Hollywood still cranks these movies out, but few of them are as well-written, gleefully staged and flat-out fun as “Hot Fuzz”. Few of them seem to realize that it is good characters and a decent, clever story that make a movie like this. If they were, then we’d be in the Eighties all over again and, trust me, that would be pretty damned awesome.

[tags]Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Lethal Weapon, The Bourne Supremacy, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward, Edgar Wright, Movie Review, Dale Nauertz[/tags]

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.