Critical Recommendation: Hot Fuzz

The ads for Hot Fuzz hail it as being from the guys who watched every action movie ever made, and having seen the thing more than once, it certainly begins to feel like watching every action movie that’s ever been made, as if I were sitting in a room full of TVs all playing the movies that inspired this one – that’s a good thing. It isn’t just an action movie or a parody: it’s a hybrid. It isn’t just a comedy, either: it’s hysterical. It’s the sum of what so many other action, cop, and comedy movies have done, but it plays with their clichés so effortlessly while also showing other movies like it where they’ve been falling short in their quest to have the same impact.

Hot Fuzz parodies cheesy police dramas like Bad Boys II while following Sergeant Nicholas Angel, a police officer from across the pond who’s arrested 400% more criminals than anyone else on the force. He’s portrayed with side-splitting brilliance by Simon Pegg in a hilariously self-serious and self-aware performance, and is being sent to the quiet village of Sandford against his own wishes because he’s making the rest of London’s force look bad in comparison to him. If one were to judge by the number of explosions on this movie’s posters, they’d probably conclude Sandford isn’t going to remain quiet for long, and is it a spoiler for me to say they’d be right? It’s pretty obvious that not everyone in this little town is who they’re pretending to be, and Hot Fuzz uses the obvious fact that you’ll catch onto that to make the willful – and sometimes malicious – ignorance of some of the other townspeople ridiculously hilarious. Almost nothing in this movie is played without a healthy dose of satire to go with it, and the jokes remain virtually non-stop without ever losing that unmistakable energy of theirs.

It shamelessly borrows from countless cop dramas before gleefully mocking their clichés, but because it commits so completely to both parody and homage, it works so well. All of the regular story tropes are there, but in a self-aware and hilariously ridiculous way. One scene features a ridiculous amount of exposition to Nicholas from one gardener who just so happens to know all of the town’s secrets, but it’s played with such self-awareness that it’s hysterical. Hot Fuzz steps on the heads of other cop dramas in its climb to the top.

You see, both the spoken and visual comedy in this movie is just brilliant. It’s filled with goofy British accents, but they’re at their best when they're content to call attention to themselves in the background rather than taking center stage. Nicholas might be having a good conversation with someone, only for some random chap to sidle up behind him and say something almost out of earshot and completely out of pocket with that silly accent of his. This movie understands that inexorable cheeriness is inherently funny when it runs up against something or someone as serious as Nicholas, and runs with it. Its visual gags are also amazing, like when Nicholas starts his crackdown by kicking a group of underage kids out of the local pub. Outside, we see a huge crowd of people leaving, and then we cut back inside to see that Nicholas is now the only person left at the pub. We can’t have the kids drinking and driving, can we?

Hot Fuzz is a long series of funny encounters and situations that stay funny, and I don’t even know how to put the brilliance of this movie’s comedy into words. You’ll just have to see and hear it for yourself. The local police force is quite incompetent in comparison to Nicholas, so much so that they look at him like he’s crazy when he so much as does his job well. The local townspeople have a very suspicious edge to them, and you’ll get the sense throughout that the movie isn’t really trying to hide the fact that they’re keeping a secret while gaslighting Nicholas into oblivion; this remains a running joke. However, that’s not to say that the movie has no surprises – far from it.

Wright’s sense of humor stays extremely intelligent and surprising, always managing to cook up new and exciting jokes. Hot Fuzz is smart, creative, and unpredictable on top of being funny. I laughed over, and over, and over again at what is the funniest movie I’ve seen in a long time, until it switched gears on me all of a sudden. There’s some occasionally shocking violence in this movie, heinous crimes made all the more shocking by the fact that much of the movie they’re in is so funny. They feel important and serious because everything else is treated with such levity. The editing is also beautifully frantic, with the lightning-quick spurts of adrenaline-fueled montage sequences pocked by flashes of white light, a parody of classic cop dramas, being the usual suspect.

Nicholas and Danny are a brilliant duo, the former because he’s goofy due to his incessant seriousness, and the latter because he’s just goofy. Nicholas is such an interesting, intelligent character, and moments like the one where he dumps an insane amount of exposition based on the observations he’s made throughout the movie make sense because we’ve seen how competent and observant an officer he really is. Through all the comedy and all the laughs, one thing remains consistent, and that’s the witty sincerity of the friendship that Nicholas and Danny share with one another. After a decade of acting together, they’ve become a well-oiled machine of unreplicable humor.

Hot Fuzz has no loose ends. It equips Nicholas with everything he needs throughout the movie, to the extent that you’ll reach points in the film where you know exactly how he’s going to solve this or that problem the second you see what it is. Its use of setup and payoff is remarkable, and sometimes very subtle. More than anything, it never runs out of ideas. It’s a nonstop onslaught of incredible parody that stays funny, and rarely have I seen a movie maintain such a fever pitch of, well, anything. It blazes a trail of hilarious violence to an ending that you’ve seen a thousand times over, just not like this.

I’ve a weakness for anything that has Made in the USA stamped on it, but this remains my favorite buddy-cop film, so move aside for now, America. Hot Fuzz is a muscular, confident comedy that’s got more jokes than a Vegas comedian, so watch out for the goose – just watch the movie. It’s a laugh a second, but in a way that stays tonally consistent and meaty, because the jokes feel like part of the movie’s personality rather than like a ticket-selling ploy. You may catch yourself intoning the greater good under your breath for a couple of days after you watch it, that or causing the clumsy local gardener to trip and fall on her shears; a joke, I hope. So many comedies feel like they’re trying to emulate the director’s favorite movie. This one feels like it’s trying to become it.

Hot Fuzz – 10/10

Matthew 22:15-22