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Hot Fuzz
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about
2007
Review: May 22, 2007
Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton
That sounds ideal.
THE SETUP:
Parody of action movies from the Shaun of the Dead dudes.
DISCUSSION:
As I’ve often noted, movies are immeasurably improved by skipping work to see them. But what about when you’ve just been laid off? When you’re coming from an interview and you’re like “Fuck the resumes, I’ll start that on Monday?” Well, if the movie is this good, it still works! It’s only when the movie totally sucks grainy asscrack that you have lots of time to reflect on what a loser you are and how you’ll end up one of those homeless dudes living under a bridge that gets assaulted and set on fire by rich drunk Long Island teens.
Here we begin with this opening that shows what an awesome London cop Nicholas Angel, played by Simon Pegg, is. There’s a lot of quick editing in regular Tony Scott-style action-movie fashion. Then Nick gets transferred to the sleepy English village of Sandford, because he’s so good he makes the rest of the force look bad. He goes to tell his estranged wife as she’s investigating a murder scene for clues [she’s a sort of CSI professional] and she—HOMO SUBTEXT ALERT—tells him that “until you find a person you can care about you’ll be married to your job.” Just tuck that one into the back of your mind, kids.
So Nick arrives in Sandford at night and quickly sizes up the town, including escorting a dunk to the police station. In the morning he finds that the drunk he brought in, Danny, played by Nick Frost, is not only on the police force, but the son of the police chief, played by the wondrous Jim Broadbent. After meeting former James Bond Timothy Dalton as a sniveling supermarket owner prone to an unusually violent turn of phrase, he and Danny stop this actor dude while speeding, and learn that he will be performing an “homage” to Romeo and Juliet that night—that turns out to be am homage to the Baz Luhrmann film of it. The next morning the two are found dead in an apparent traffic accident. Soon Nicholas will begin to suspect that the many accidents in the village are, in fact, not accidents.
And that’s where we’re going to leave the plot description behind, because the plot is the least interesting part of the movie and is really just a framework to hang its comedy and action-movie parody on. One notices right up front that the editing is very good. I could have done without all the flashy inserts, but just the workaday editing between scenes creates little juxtapositions and transitions between scenes that are humorous.
But it wasn’t until toward the end that I realized what was really going on: that the movie was aping lines and camera angles and conventions from the unending pantheon of action movies, but doing it in such a straightforward, unannounced way that you could easily miss it if you weren’t familiar with the movies. My first clue as to this was when Danny says to Nick “Forget it Nicholas, it’s Sandford,” a parody of the famous final line of Chinatown. The movie does clue viewers in to this, by showing a sequence from Point Break and one from Bad Boys II, then having each of these sequences be parodied in the movie later, but these are only two clues to let you know to be on the lookout for parodies all the way through. I mean, obviously the whole thing is a parody, but what I'm saying is that there are a lot of small, specific references that are packed in here and go by completely without comment.
Once I realized this the movie went from being mildly amusing to really funny for me. My favorite part was when Nick and Danny finally accept their destiny as action heroes and don their sunglasses and guns as the camera spins pointlessly around them in a scene aped from the one they’d shown us earlier in Bad Boys II.
It’s one of those British things where you don’t so much laugh out loud as are vaguely amused throughout, but I have to say I ended up liking it a lot more than Shaun of the Dead. That movie started out strong but went on a little too long and got a little too serious by the end, whereas this one starts slow and just gets funnier. It is also a fully realized story in itself—i.e. not just a collection or parodies, like Scary Movie 17 or whatever—that you can be involved in from beginning to end.
Now what about this homo subtext I mentioned? You recall that Nick’s wife said that he’d be married to his job until he found a person he cared about? Well the reason I wrote that down early on is that I had a strong suspicion the person he would come to care about would be Danny. And sure enough. First he lets his guard down and goes drinking with Danny [Nick did not drink at all up to this point] and they stay up watching movies, falling asleep snuggled together. Then Nick wins Danny a monkey by winning a skill game at a fair [“I won it for you”], and he buys his favorite lily plant for Danny to have. In the end Danny ends up shifting his devotion from his father to Nicholas; like any marriage. But all of this is still meant to be part of the knowing homage to vaguely homoerotic action pictures, like the Lethal Weapon series, rather than just a straightforward subtext that arose on its own. And that’s a lot of what I liked about the whole movie: it was able to integrate its parodies into a compelling story, rather than just be a collection of stolen moments from other films.
It’s way gorier than it needed to be, and I’m afraid that it is so subtle many people will miss most of its humor [and it didn’t do all that well, did it?]. I was there giggling away, while at the same time the guy four seats over said to his friend “This is SO BORING.” So, as usual, I guess it depends on what you’re bringing in.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
I would. Your enjoyment of it will depend on your familiarity with action movie cliches and techniques.
