Genre revisionism at its most brazen

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2015)

The difficultly to define Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz is one of the things that makes Hot Fuzz such a fun and original film. It very much finds itself at a crossroads of genres rather than operating in one specific realm of cinematic classification. If you simply bill the film as a comedy, despite it largely being one, you're neglecting to mention the excessive amounts of violence that often isn't played for laughs, the immense amount of action spectacle, and even the mystery and crime element essential to the plot. If you simply call it a crime film (being that "action" isn't one of the six main genres), you dismiss the ubiquitous elements of parody and satire that bleed through nearly every scene of the film.
The film focuses on the incredibly serious police officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), who is working with his bumbling partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) in order to investigate exactly why and how the town of Stanford has went more than two decades without a murder, yet the town always seems to be caught up in little accidents that find its citizens killed. The two embark on a journey that involves corruption, secret groups, and unfathomable bloodshed all while trying to uphold the integrity Stanford still has in itself and its name.
The way I see it, Hot Fuzz is an amalgamation of comedy and crime, and maybe with a sprinkle of horror. The comedy is largely classifiable as screwball, as it's largely bent on dialog and the idea that everybody but Simon Pegg's Officer Nicholas Angel character is the only serious soul in a sea of bumbling and blissfully ignorant buffoons. The crime element largely stems from the inherent mystery as to why the town of Stanford has remained murder/crime-free for an upwards of two decades, and that core mystery is what kicks the plot into motion. The aforementioned horror elements are very sporadic, but largely stem from the execution of the murders, which largely disrupt the flow of the film, regardless of what genre it was working towards in the momentary. The murder scenes are often abrupt and occupied by vicious bloodshed that turns the film from a goofy comedy into a vicious and violent picture.
Speaking in a descriptive sense - one that has the film operating in a very subversive sense - Hot Fuzz largely occupies a fictitious world, where characters occasionally act as if they're too dumb to function like normal human beings. Consider the over-dramatized reactions of much of the townspeople of Stanford, specifically the officials who are keeping the murders a secret. They are broadly drawn caricatures where, in a more conventional crime film, they'd be slicker, more believable, and more passable as key players in a conspiracy movement. With that, the writing team of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (and occasionally Nick Frost with the other two installments of the Cornetto Trilogy), there is an emphasis on merging genres that allow for broad, satirical comedy in addition to gruesome bloodshed. The excessive, unrelenting violence in "Hot Fuzz" is noteworthy being that it often comes after some witty dialog or situational humor. This creates a very evident narrative dichotomy that emphasizes revisionist principles in terms of merging genres rather than sticking to one particular genre.
Speaking in a prescriptive sense - one that has the film adhering to conventions and preconceived genre formulas - Hot Fuzz abides by comedic conventions by way of dialog, a common approach in satire. Consider the scene when Nicholas speaks to the older woman and she randomly shouts "Fascist!" towards Nicholas, stopping him in his tracks before realizing she is filling in a box on her crossword puzzle. The same trope is used when Nicholas says "hag," referring to another answer on the woman's crossword puzzle, despite the fact that Nicholas utters it like he's referring to her. This is a fairly recognizable attempt at comedy – the classic misunderstanding to us, the audience, between the characters in the film. Comedic convention also arises from the fact that characters are put in a situation they'd rather not be in, or one that's precarious to their safety, well-being, or specific morals. Nicholas Angel being paired up with Nick Frost's Danny Butterman, a goofy but well-meaning police officer, adheres to comedic convention because the two are polar opposites; Angel is stern and self-sufficient whereas Butterman is the more roly-poly type of cop who often seems in it for the fun.
For the crime aspect, despite Hot Fuzz, in a way, rebelling against the conventions of buddy-cop comedies by having the two mismatched leads discover and infiltrate a conspiracy, the film does indeed play by the genre's tropes. In the end, the bad guys are violently defeated, the two leads learn to embrace what makes one another unique and their own person, and two men we've followed since the beginning of the film come out on top. This is a very classical element in a film that, in many ways, is largely revisionist. However, in order to incorporate the new, you need to have some of the old, which is why the descriptive aspect of the film is just as important as its more descriptive aspects.
Above all, it's the ridiculousness and the sheer outlandish premise that draws us to Hot Fuzz; there's a magnetic sense of urgency that attaches us to the characters and their personalities from the start. Seeing one character, who is stern and serious, alongside a goofier archetype both get into sticky situations no matter how hard they try, is one that, when taken here, feels fun and fresh thanks to Pegg and Wright's variety of situational humor. Hot Fuzz is very much genre revisionism, and in a prescriptive sense, it's a film that emphasizes its differences from the comedy, crime, and action genre rather than the conventions of the aforementioned genres that it abides by throughout the course of the film.