When comedy masterminds reunite...

Rating: 9/10 (21 December 2007)

Wow. Just wow. That was my reaction the first time I had finished watching "Shaun of the Dead", the masterpiece that had put British comedy on the map again in a large scale. Perfect casting, extremely original storytelling resulted in the making of a one-of-a-kind "rom zom com", as it was affectionately called by its cast and crew.
When I first heard the cast and crew were going to reunite to make another film, my expectations were soring to previously unexplored heights. The thing that appeals to me most in Wright's work is that he doesn't make stale parodies, but actual homages to the genre he's focusing on at that particular time. "Shaun" was a great visual representation of how a five-star zombie movie scenario might take place in a London suburb, and in "Hot Fuzz" they try and figure out how a huge Hollywood action movie might look in the small countryside village of Stanford.
The movie starts off a bit slow for the first twenty-or-so minutes, but the same could very well be said for "Shaun". Wright takes his time to unfold the storyline and get all pieces set up for the actual events that shake the very foundations of the rustic little village. After the first half hour, the movie starts flying past your eyes at an incredible rate. The movie is just about two hours long, but it feels like half an hour, and in my book that's a very good sign, because time always flies when you're having fun.
The comic duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost once again do a great job, Bill Nighy (stepfather Philip in "Shaun" and of course Davy Jones in the latest installments of "Pirates") has a rather minor part as the Met Chief Inspector Kenneth, but pulls it off wonderfully. The characters in the movie are all very "British", by which I mean they are very extreme. Every character in "Hot Fuzz" is a stereotype of what these people look like in other movies. The pious vicar, the nervous gossip, the scary old landlady, and so on. This interesting mix of characters makes "Hot Fuzz" all the more fun to watch.
On top of all that, the film makers don't take themselves very seriously, and have added plenty of blatant references to "Shaun of the Dead" and other movies they admire.
I might not say this very often, but if these people are able to come up with a quality Britcom like this every three years or so, they can keep doing it as far as I'm concerned, there are plenty of different genres I'd like to see a homage of. Mafia movies perhaps? Or maybe even fantasy? 9/10 well earned, and the only reason I am not giving this a 10 is because I do not believe in perfection...