That's entertainment!

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2008)

Hot Fuzz Directed by Edgar Wright
The puns and general playfulness of British comedy seem to permeate Hot Fuzz as well as a regard for popular culture well beyond most. But Edgar Wright who wrote the slight but entertaining Shaun of the Dead transplants the typical cop movie to Britain. This trip gives the movie an apparent sense of political awareness, I was not aware of going in. At first it struck me as a trifle of Monty Python pathos, but the underlying commentary on the genre and culture were too large to ignore.
A masterful cop, Nicholas Angel (played by Simon Pegg, in his second collaboration with Wright), is moved from the London Police Department to that of a small English town. He is told the reason is because "you continue to be exceptional, and we can't have that. You make the others look bad." In this seemingly idyllic town of Sandford, he uncovers a conspiracy, representing Suburban and cop movie's paranoia as much as an internal war to keep order that comes at great cost. It's a commentary that could reach up to the higher levels of our government.
Its violent big finish, coming mere weeks after Virginia Tech is more in the name of sending up human nature than for mere entertainment and Pegg's character insists that the cop's most powerful tool is his notebook. Still the sequence mocks our numbness to violence by accentuating it. The Virginia Tech non-issue should be viewed as such because of the network's own broadcast of much more harmful violence all week long.
It's not snobby or condescending to police films either, it pays tribute to Bad Boys 2 more than it needs too, but pays tribute to what is genuinely virtuous about these movies by showing people finding their place in a community and enforcing justice. The conspiracy complicates when the festively plump and incompetent son (Nick Frost) of the conspiracy's hooded leader and ironically also the town's police chief befriends Angel. The two are an odd pairing, but compelling nonetheless and can restore faith in the virtues of team work in the law force.
Contrasting all this with Best Picture winner The Departed whose own seriousness about internal affairs takes all the excitement and irony out of violence while representing a failure to expose it. It's own clockwork intensity and seriousness contrast with the relaxed brilliance and satiric edge of Hot Fuzz whose payoffs are dense and emotional not cold and necessary.
Its adoration for the action movie and by extension the Western, exposes our own ambivalence to cultural decay. But Fuzz proves that the best medicine for that is laughter and it's own political commentary more than disproves it's own possible ambivalence, but counters our own. Hot Fuzz while an irresistible satire including jokes on small town cops also manages to toy with the idea of a Utopian humor community where everything is give and take.