Hot Fuzz

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

It’s been argued for the past couple of years that there have been too many action movies with big explosions. Purveyors of this genre include directors Michael Bay, John Woo, Tony Scott, and Joel Schumacher, as well as producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver, and Hollywood superheroes such as the Governator, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, Will Smith, and many, many more. With all of the explosions and grisly ways these action stars dealt death in films, it seemed that the newest flick was just trying to outdo the previous one, plot be damned. How then do we describe the little flick titled “Hot Fuzz”?

Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is London’s most prolific police officer. His arrest record is 400% higher than any of his contemporaries. In fact, he’s so good that he’s making his bosses look bad. Thus, he’s promoted to sergeant but reassigned to the countryside, in Sandford. Here, the crime rate is low but the accident rate is surprisingly high. For a small town, Angle starts noticing that they have some rather large secrets. Partnered with the overeager Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), Angel tries to solve a series of murders in the village, all while trying to prove Sandford isn’t as clean as people would have you believe.

Director Edgar Wright re-teams with Pegg three years after the huge success of their horror comedy “Shaun of the Dead”. If “Shaun” was their tribute/satire of horror movies, “Hot Fuzz” is their love letter to the big budget blockbusters which most of us grew up watching with a decidedly English slant. Nick Angel is an over-the-top portrayal of the supercops in those films, someone so superhuman that when he interacts with regular people, everyone sees him as odd. It’s Frost’s Danny who serves as the audience’s reference point, after all, he’s the one who has a mundane life and who longs to have some excitement like he’s seen in the movies.

Wright’s quick editing mixed with graphic shots and witty dialogue keep one on edge when taking in “Fuzz”. With a great cast of veteran actors like Timothy Dalton and Jim Broadbent (and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from Cate Blanchett and director Peter Jackson), Wright seems to now have a bigger budget at his disposal than in previous works. The humor, though very dry and British, is quite funny and hits at the right spots. The action and the whodunit mystery are necessary elements to push the story forward and none of them are sacrificed in favor of other elements.

In crafting a film tribute to Hollywood’s action monsters, Wright, Pegg and company have come up with something uniquely their own. Though not working with as big a budget as those blockbusters, the end results is a funny movie with sharp dialogue, great action scenes, and an actual plot that you oftentimes wished the Hollywood equivalents had in the first place.