It's a sleepy English village versus the fuzz!
Written: May 22 '07
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Great acting, hilarious dialogue and scenes
Cons: two movies in one, too many climaxes (good in other things but not movies)
The Bottom Line: Definitely a winner from Simon Pegg. Two movies in one (and not intentionally), but both are great.
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| hist's Full Review: Hot Fuzz |
I first became a fan of Simon Pegg with his critically-acclaimed Shaun of the Dead, which was a wonderful film but suffered a bit from feeling like two different movies smashed together. Even so, I enjoyed it enough that I couldn't wait to see his latest film, Hot Fuzz. While the previous film was a take-off on zombie movies, this one is a parody of Hollywood action movies, going so far as to take whole sequences from some of them and making light of them. It's a hilarious movie, but again it suffers a bit from being two movies in one. At least this time, it doesn't get super-serious in the process.
Police Constable Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is almost a super-cop on the London police force. He's the best at everything, and frankly, he's making the rest of the squad look bad. So they engineer a promotion to Sergeant and a transfer to the quiet English village of Sandford, where nothing ever happens. Except for the fact that there do seem to be a high number of accidents. Angel is paired with Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the son of the local police chief (Jim Broadbent), and Butterman is a perfect example of the police force (sorry, "service") in Sandford: lazy, uninterested in doing much police work and more interested in birthday parties and ice cream. But Sandford has a dark secret, one that may bring that tranquility to an end once it's discovered.
I loved almost every minute of this movie, but it does suffer from a case of schizophrenia. The first three quarters of the movie is about the contrast between the by-the-book Angel (his first night in town, before he's even started his job, he throws almost the entire clientele of the local pub into jail for underage drinking) and the laid-back attitudes of the villagers. The fact that Angel is obviously right about the series of murders that happen once he gets there (the locals call them "accidents") causes most of the tension, and the differences between the two sides are hilarious.
But then the movie turns into a bloody parody of action movies, completely shifting gears and giving viewers whiplash if they're not careful. It's a damn funny parody of action movies, taking a whole sequence from Bad Boys (or maybe the second one, I forget) and making fun of it in typical Pegg style, but it's still quite different. The beginning is quiet, the ending is loud and gross at times, and the border between the two is quite jarring. Thankfully all the promos seem to emphasize the action, so at least the loudness shouldn't be surprising.
With that mild criticism out of the way, I have to say that I spent a fun two hours with this movie. The beginning is a bit slow at times, but the jokes come fast enough that it's not that much of a problem. Pegg is hilarious as the straight man, the overly dutiful cop who can't seem to let his hair down. Frost is perfect as his loser partner who has a thing for action movies (Point Break and Bad Boys seeming to be his favorites). I really loved watching Danny quiz Angel about the things he's done (or not done). "Ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?'" "No." The rest of the cast is remarkable as well, very British and just this side of over the top (though Timothy Dalton does cross the line occasionally).
One thing I loved about Hot Fuzz was the attention to detail. There's the fight in the "model village" that makes the two combatants look like Godzilla stomping Tokyo, which was delicious fun. Even better is the evidence tags left on the confiscated weapons that our heroes use in the violence at the end of the movie. I'm not sure whether the director was just being thorough or whether that was one of the jokes, but either way, it was on the mark.
My main criticism of the movie is the numerous climaxes in the film. Just when we think everything's fine, something else happens to get the action going again for one more sequence. I realize action movies do this all the time, so doing it twice would have been funny. But after that, it was a bit of overkill (though I do have to say that the final climax was, once again, hilarious despite being overkill).
The violence in Hot Fuzz makes a fairly obvious comment on the soullessness of most action movies, where explosions and the hero making a sarcastic comment after dispatching one of the bad guys is more important than an actual storyline and believable characters. It does this not only with the explosions and gunfire, but also by throwing all pretense of reality (or at least as much reality as a parody has to begin with) out the window once the shooting starts. Suddenly, everybody's got guns and it's just good guys vs. bad guys in a shoot-em-up that takes no prisoners.
As I mentioned, Hot Fuzz has a few really gross scenes, and there's definitely a lot of foul language (hey, kind of like most action movies!). Blood and violence is a mainstay of the end of the movie, so it definitely earns its R rating. That doesn't matter, though. It's a hilarious movie that must be seen if you're tired of the typical Hollywood fare. You'll never look at an action movie the same way again.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
hist
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Member: David Roy
Location: Vancouver, BC
Reviews written: 723
Trusted by: 218 members
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