Color me disappointed.

Rating: 5/10 (21 April 2007)

I was looking forward to Hot Fuzz - but Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright let me down for the first time.
This is a very, very weird movie. It's a hybrid comedy-action-horror piece, and the different elements don't sit well together. Somehow, Pegg and Wright's "Shaun of the Dead" successfully crossed genres, but the same experiment doesn't work here. The action scenes seem tacked on, the horror comes out of nowhere, and the comedy simply isn't strong enough - the good laughs are scarce.
Part of the problem is that the film is simply too intense. It's too loud, the cutting's too rapid, the scenes are too short. Oftentimes, Wright introduces tension and unease in a scene for no particular reason. This technique worked fine on half-hour episodes of his sitcom "Spaced," but it gets wearisome in a feature-length film; beside, it undercuts the real (deserved) tension that develops later.
Another problem is that this movie is distinctly lacking a feminine touch. There are no major female characters - in fact, there are hardly any minor ones. It's very much an overdose of testosterone. (Perhaps "Spaced" is so good because comedienne Jessica Stevenson contributed to the scripts and prevented them from descending into this kind of boy's-own stupidity?)
I don't mean to suggest that "Hot Fuzz" is terrible. The opening scenes have got something, and Nick Frost is always at least cute. But the jarring shifts in tone, relative lack of laughs, violence, and darkness all work together to produce an unsatisfactory result. I'm looking forward to seeing more work from this comedy team, but they'll have to beat this effort to keep me interested.