Hot Fuzz works!

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2008)

Hot Fuzz opens with Detective Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) getting sent to the small town of Sandford because he's so good at his job that he's made the big city police force look bad in comparison. Angel gets a doughy sidekick (Nick Frost) and is forced to fix problems like escaped swans and rowdy jugglers. When a series of unusual accidents start to befall the residents of Sandford, Angel realizes that crazy doesn't always distinguish between the city and the country, forcing him to take justice into his own hands.
Do you remember how well co-writer/director Edgar Wright and co-writer/star Simon Pegg used zombie influences to tell an actual story in Shaun of the Dead? At first, horror fans were just trying to spot the references to various zombie movies, but - and this is the reason why Shaun continues to grow in popularity - the movie quickly became enjoyable and interesting on its own terms, completely independent from the films that inspired it. Hot Fuzz does an even better job at taking a genre and not just spoofing it, but actually becoming a part of it. And it does it by being hilariously over-the-top and yet miraculously unoffensive. Without giving too much away, Hot Fuzz features some of the most insane gore you'll see all year, including an old lady getting kicked in the face, and a priest getting shot and shouting "Jesus Christ!" as he hits the ground. On paper, it sounds like the kind of thing that would offend most of the Red states, but it's so incredibly engaging and well-done, you'll have a hard time imagining anyone not having a good time. Hot Fuzz is so much pure fun, that if you don't like it, you don't really like movies.
Finally, let's make one distinction clear. There's a whole genre of comedy nowadays that just takes what's familiar and simply regurgitates it with more fart jokes and mugging. ("Remember Borat? Wasn't that great?") Hot Fuzz is absolutely not "Action Movie" (although that's probably not too far down the road from those Epic and Date Movie folks). Writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg LOVE action movies. Movies like Point Break are easy to make fun of - anyone could do that - but it's really difficult to find a way to both make fun of and pay respect to the cheesy action genre that most of us secretly hold as a guilty pleasure. The final act of Hot Fuzz actually becomes an over-the-top action extravaganza with some shoot-outs and car chases that are as well choreographed as most of the action movies released this year (it doesn't hurt to have recognizable genre faces like Edward Woodward and Timothy Dalton in major roles). In fact, at the end of the year, Hot Fuzz may be both your favorite comedy and your favorite action movie of 2007, and that's no joke.