'Fuzzy Vice'

Rating: 8/10 (23 April 2007)

The very best parodies don't only mock the things they make fun of; they also embody them.
Take "Shaun of the Dead," the 2004 zombie movie from the team of writer-director Edgar Wright, writer-actor Simon Pegg and actor Nick Frost. It was a delicious comedy, a sharp satire of English manners, a spoof of zombie movies and a pretty brain-eater picture all in one. You couldn't help but love it.
Now the trio have taken on another hoary genre -- the Hollywood cop-buddy action movie ("Bad Boys," the "Lethal Weapon" films) -- and transported it, lovingly but with wicked, piercing humor, to the English countryside. The result is "Hot Fuzz," a film that's terrific fun as a comedy if not quite taut as an instance of the genre it spoofs.
As in "Shaun," "Fuzz" skewers movie clichés and lifeless verities of English life with merciless wit. Once again, the goings-on are only a slight distortion of the movie genre being sent up. And once again, the weakest portion of the film is the last, when plotting and the impulse toward a full-circle ending smother the script's vitality. It's delicious comedy overall, though, building on, if not exactly surpassing, the promise of "Shaun." Pegg is Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a London cop so gung-ho and effective that his superiors have to get rid of him: He simply makes everyone else look slack. Shunted off to the crime-free village of Sandford, Angel finds his resolve even more unwelcome, if that's possible. The cops are witless clowns, and they and the townsfolk care more about winning the "village of the year" contest than about what little harmless crimes occur. But then people start dying -- always by accident, always with plausible explanations -- and Angel just knows that something big is going on. With his only ally the particularly stupid officer Danny Butterman (Frost), he determines to ferret out the killer that he believes is afoot.
It sounds like your basic A-B-C police-fish-out-of-water picture, which, of course, is part of the point. Pegg and Wright explicitly introduce standard bits of the movies they're mocking, then ingeniously undermine them with humor while leaving them standing: hard-as-nails Angel is an absurd martinet with ludicrous devotion to duty, yet he really is tough and smart and good at his job; Danny is almost too stupid to credit, but his passion for the very movies that are being parodied fuels the satire even as he never truly overcomes his ineptitude.
Around his heroes, Wright has an embarrassment of swell English actors having a grand time: Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy as Angel's dismissive London bosses; Jim Broadbent as the village police chief (and Danny's father); small-town cops including the sneering detectives Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall; and a gallery of iconic village types including Timothy Dalton as the local grocery tycoon and lady-killer.
As in "Shaun," the final act is overstuffed with action, and while some of it amuses, you feel that the film has fallen on the wrong side of the line separating parody from its object. Moreover, it doesn't make as much of the theme, shared with "Shaun," of male bonding and maturity.
But it's smashing fun, nonetheless, made with razor wit and continual invention and far, far fresher than not only Hollywood buddy-cop movies but also Hollywood's own spoofs of them.