Totally unique, witty "dark/action" comedy

Rating: 9/10 (22 January 2009)

"Hot Fuzz" seems to get most of its fame from being the follow-up to "Shaun of the Dead" by director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, but the truth is that this film is better and it stands alone as a great dark, action comedy without "Shaun."
The first reason "Fuzz" is better than "Shaun" is because it's more accessible. Some people have stigma's against zombie movies and "Shaun" was sort of stuck playing off the characteristics of zombie movies. "Fuzz" is a small-town murder mystery wrapped in a horror film wrapped in a comedy. Sometimes all that makes it hard to take seriously, but when you embrace that it's all for comedic effect and stop caring so much about plot, it's all the more enjoyable.
The film's main character is Nicholas Angel (Pegg), a top cop in London who suddenly gets transferred to the small rural town of Sanford because his diligence makes all the other P.Os look bad. Of course in Sanford, the citizens talk of "the greater good" and don't care much about proper law enforcement provided everyone's happy. Of course when "accidents" start happening resulting in people's deaths, all that begins to change.
It doesn't sound exactly like a comedy on premise, but the clash of Pegg's big city super-cop personality and that of the ignorant Stanford citizens is a starting point for all of it. There is an onslaught of bizarre characters in the town who play up their small-town innocent mentality by making jokes, insulting each other or acting plain weird. This is where the skills of a supporting cast with Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton come in. Capped off by the humorously naive performance by Nick Frost as Butterfield, sort of Angel's assistant, there is plenty to laugh at whether it's the female officer's sexual explicit jokes to her all-male department, the "Andys" two foul-mouthed detectives, or the variety of slurring characters that only the townies can understand.
All this time, "Hot Fuzz" builds toward an action movie spoof resulting in one of the more satisfying end sequences in any film, especially comedy. Usually comedies end in cheese as the writers tie up the more human elements of the story, but "Hot Fuzz" blossoms into the stylish action flick it wants so desperately to be given by the amount of "Bad Boys II" and "Break Point" references. Wright definitely has an eye for action and you could predict this based on his overuse of fast close-up jump cut sequences. This gives the end as much style points as it deserves spoof points.
There really is some brilliance to the writing--all loose ends of the mystery are tied up and nearly all the jokes that are made in the film come back for another round of laughs in the end. You simply don't see comedies do that well anymore. So while it may come off initially as sort of gross, over-the-top, violent humor, it concludes on a satisfyingly witty note.