Hot Fuzz a Shining Star in a Sea of Normality

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 2019)

The action genre has been getting more and more bland as the years go by with movies tending to seem like they're just the same movie with different actors but every once in while a few movies breaking the mold and become something greater, one of those films it is the 2007 movie Hot Fuzz. Hot Fuzz is a parody action comedy that perfectly mocks and emulates genres. Hot Fuzz stars Simon Pegg, most well known for his role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Unkar Plutt, and Nick Frost, whom is most well known for starring in the other movies in the Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End.) and is directed by Edgar Wright, who has directed of all the movies in the Cornetto Trilogy along with my own personal favorite movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World so you know the direction, shot, and composition are going to be great. The films main character Nicholas Angel, played by Simon Pegg, is the best cop in all of London so good that he makes all of the other police officers in the station look bad so to avoid this the higher ups decide to send him to Sandford for a cushy desk job out in the country far from the city of London. The main supporting actor Nick Frost's character Danny Butterman is a Lethal Weapon, action movie loving junior cop whom when he first meets Sergeant Angel idolizes him for seeming to be a character ripped straight from one of his favorite movies. One of the biggest themes in this movie is old vs. new, for example Sergeant Angel in the beginning of the film is very stuck to his ways when it comes to police duty always doing things by the book one of the biggest things is the third in Sanford where he first checks the ids of everyone in the bar, almost everyone is underage, and as he takes a drunk man who attempted to drive home arrests several people along the way, this shows his by the books nature that made him the cop he is. One of my favorite things in Hot Fuzz is it's blatant use of foreshadowing and visual gags, for example the movie foreshadows be later soon in the movie when they make an announcement at the beginning of the festival outside the church, another thing that I enjoyed with the film was its use of visual gags when it came to paperwork making paperwork seem all intense when it is really just bland and mundane. The are two things make Hot Fuzz the great movie that it is, it's British style comedy and how it was shot. Now with a parity comedy is an obvious thing but these jokes that are told or not just simple improvised quits or you get from a Adam Sandler movie, take pixels for example where he comes into a room with a bunch of government officials and starts making fun of them for no reason at all where is in this movie jokes are used to build tension to carry plan or just change the mood. As for how it was shot most details in the frame seems to be important in one way or another and in the B roll which tends to be boring shots of the location maybe a plane lifting off or a car driving off isn't the most exciting thing to watch yet in the movie they have purpose to it, take for example when in the when Sergeant Angel is going from London to Sandford, it goes from him leaving his apartment with his peace Lily to a taxi to him on a train train stop getting woken up by a train passing by back on the train driving past the Sandford welcome sign and into the city. Now while this sequence is not the most exciting thing what it does is show us the audience the distance he's traveling, this is not a some place that's close by where he could hop on a train and then just go back to the city, no Sandford is very far away. As for its parody aspect and how it handles that it starts off with Sergeant Angel rejecting the clichés in action movies to then at the end becoming the cliché action movie character that he rejected in the beginning. To conclude I believe that Hot Fuzz is one of the best action films to date with clever writing and great acting that parodies and exemplifies what can make these action movies great.