A Valiant but Sophomoric Attempt from a Growing, Very Talented Troupe of Players

Rating: 5/10 (10 April 2007)

Hot Fuzz reviewed by Samuel Osborn
Hot Fuzz is Edgar Wright's follow-up to the clever UK cult smash Shaun of the Dead. Both films run on the same fuel, wearing the chassis of a spoof picture over a more respectful genre comedy underneath. The formula works tepidly this time around, working off a less compelling genre (what can be more compelling than zombies?) and an even less clever screenplay. The same players thankfully return though, with Simon Pegg in the lead role and Nick Frost returning as his adorable doofus foil. The whole project feels like a valiant but sophomoric attempt from a growing, very talented troupe of players and filmmakers. It's not the kind of transitional failure that's bound to oust Wright and company from the business; but the sort of disappointing follow-up that'll quench their loyalists thirst just long enough to wait for their third, hopefully much-improved outing.
Edgar Wright mentioned at the screening last Monday that he and his co-writer Simon Pegg aren't out to make parodies, just genre pictures that are funny. So the chosen genre for Hot Fuzz is the Buddy-Cop Film, popularized by the likes of Lethal Weapon, Vanishing Point, and Bad Boys. Their own version of this cop duo is Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) and PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). Angel has been shoved out of the London Metropolitan force for being too efficient. Bill Nighy, in a sly cameo, puts it shamelessly by saying "You're making us all look bad." So Angel is relocated to the crime-free village-of-the-year, Sandford, where he meets a dorky gang of police officers sitting around their precinct chowing cake. Without crime there's little need for cops, making Angel an irrelevance. Thankfully, a glib serial killer gowned as the Grim Reaper starts decapitating villagers nightly. Though the rest of the precinct sees the deaths as unfortunate accidents, Angel insights correctly that they're the work a murderer. So as the body count rises, Angel and his cop-flick obsessed partner Butterman, start an investigation of their own.
What must be remembered is that a British cop film hasn't been released in a while, probably because police officers aren't allowed to brandish firearms in the UK, rendering much of the drama that officers unload here in the States moot. Wright capitalizes on this fact and makes it a kind of running joke throughout Hot Fuzz. Without the fingering of triggers and clinks and clanks of reloading and cocking of the gun, Wright turns to every other noise to emphasize. Car doors opening and closing, the unraveling of caution tape, and even the application of a super-stylish toothpick all get their own ridiculous sonic exaggeration. The film also gets progressively American, Wright says, the further into the mystery Angel burrows. The dialogue repeatedly gets dumbed-down from talky British humor to single-syllabic American expressions. By the end, the usually over-explanatory Angel reduces his speech to a single, grimaced word: "Idea." But it's only these clever directorial tricks that remind us that Hot Fuzz is from the same womb as Shaun of the Dead.
Bluntly, Hot Fuzz just isn't very funny. It embraces its chosen genre as fully and lovingly as Shaun of the Dead did, but without the same clever severity. The jokes generally aren't molded to fit the Buddy-Cop genre and are scooped more often from the buckets of broad, common humor. Making matters more dull, the Buddy-Cop device fails to be compelling. Sergeant Angel is cold and mechanical, but not humorously so. He's a yawn at best. And though PC Butterman fishes out most of Hot Fuzz's laughs, he isn't much more than a broad, rounded goofball. The whole thing looks fine enough, as Edgar Wright is a budding, impressive filmmaker with a lot of insightful ideas about the movies rolling off his tongue; but this project is a mild misfire.
Samuel Osborn