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Hot Fuzz (2007)

Director: Edgar Wright

Average user rating

4 reviews

Synopsis

A city cop investigates a series of grisly deaths in the seemingly sleepy village of Sandford.

Movie review

From Time Out London

The Sandford Players’ tribute to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ isn’t your average pig’s ear of a local production: this particular pig’s ear is modelled on Baz Luhrmann’s high-octane celluloid adaptation, down to a curtain-call singalong of The Cardigans’ ‘Lovefool’, as featured on Luhrmann’s soundtrack. Wham-bam am-dram – surely a hiding to nothing if ever there was one? Yet with ‘Hot Fuzz’, as with ‘Shaun of the Dead’ before it, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg show that a Hollywood genre aesthetic can be grafted onto the preposterously inappropriate fabric of banal English life with surprising success – as long as you take it seriously.Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a high-achieving London sergeant dispatched to the West Country because he’s showing up his fellow Met officers. Greeted reasonably warmly, especially by town drunk and fellow copper Danny (Nick Frost), he makes some stiff steps towards finding a place in the tight-knit community. But, compulsively alert as he is, Angel starts to wonder if there’s more to a series of ‘accidental’ local deaths than meets the eye…

Though Wright and Pegg’s latest is stocked with as many film and TV references as ‘Spaced’ and ‘Shaun…’, it mines most of its plentiful laughs from the collision of Angel’s uptight uprightness with the lackadaisical village ways of Sandford, a genteel backwater of quintessentially English naffness that suddenly becomes the backdrop for a crescendo of disarmingly credible chase and shoot-out set-pieces. It’s Pegg’s stonily straight-faced performance – amid an almost distractingly high-calibre cast of comedy stalwarts (Bill Bailey, Olivia Colman, Adam Buxton) and legit luminaries (Jim Broadbent, Billie Whitelaw, Timothy Dalton as a moustache-twirling supermarket manager) – that holds things together, and also reflects the film’s essentially respectful attitude towards the action movie. ‘Hot Fuzz’ isn’t a spoof or parody: its jokes aren’t at the expense of genre expectations, but its characters’ failure to live up to them; correspondingly, the editing is sincerely frenetic and the violence, though sometimes ridiculous, is strong and bloody. It’s not a perfect template – running motifs are glaringly flagged up and there are at least two too many climaxes – but for both gags and thrills, few current British filmmakers come close. The Sandford Players can eat their hearts out.

Author: Ben Walters

Time Out London Issue 1904: February 14-20 2007

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User reviews of this film

Mike said...

Posted on Mar 03 2011 17:14 Excellent. Definitely Wright/Pegg/Frost's best so far. Highly recommended if you're the only person in the country who hasn't heard about it.

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DUDE said...

Posted on Jan 03 2009 21:27 It was soo violent!!!!

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Leona Luk said...

Posted on Jul 29 2007 18:30 This film explodes into glorious excess, as so many cop films have done before - the difference here being the quaint British village as backdrop, and the absolutely intended hilarity of it all. Fantastic casting and fabulous writing brings everything together here.
If I felt that the start was a little slow, the second half of the film proved it all worthwhile. This is a great film from guys who obviously know their stuff, as every joke hits the intended spot.

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Jen said...

Posted on Jun 27 2007 17:37 Extremely well made and hilarious - went straight into my top ten fave movies!

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