‘Hot Fuzz’

Too silly for a straight cop movie and not funny enough for a comedy, it’s hard to give this film the love it wants.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   How long can pop culture keep riffing on the same material before it degenerates into Muzak?
   I’m wondering about that because I just saw Hot Fuzz, the latest from the talented English team behind Shaun of the Dead (actor/co-writer Simon Pegg, actor Nick Frost and co-writer/director Edgar Wright). Shaun pulled it off, investing enough ingenious setups, funny lines and recognizable characters in their warmhearted "rom zom com" to give it a life of its own, making it more than just a mashup of romantic comedy and zombie movie clichés.
   Hot Fuzz is another exercise in what Wright calls "total genre immersion." In an interview with The Onion, the director says: "We pretty much cover the corruption cop genre, the fish-out-of-water cop genre, the serial-killer thriller cop genre, the buddy-action film." He forgot to mention Agatha Christie.
   An amiable Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, Hot Fuzz is as hard to dislike as the eager-to-please, childlike cop played by Frost. It works hard to win our love, creating an internally logical world from a mishmash of mismatched parts, but it can’t breathe more than fitful life into its creation.
   The main joke in Fuzz is the disconnect between the mundane routines of a rural police officer’s life and the heroics and pyrotechnics routinely displayed by Hollywood cops. "There is no way you can perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork," observes Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Pegg) after watching a blow-em-up cop movie with his partner, Danny (Frost).
   The fish-out-of-water box gets checked off early as Angel, a hotshot London cop who has alienated his fellow officers by outperforming them, is packed off to the quiet little village of Sandford. His starstruck new partner, Danny (Frost) follows him around like a St. Bernard puppy, asking if he’s done any of the things cops do in the movies, like "firing your gun up in the air and going ‘AAARGH!’" But things aren’t as quiet as they seem in Sandford, and Angel is soon coping with more than stray swans.
   The film is shot in the picturesque little town where Wright grew up, which is portrayed as a place where the biggest concern is what one of the village elders refers to as "the extremely irritating living statue" and one farmer’s accent is so impenetrable it takes two translators to make it intelligible: one to break it down to somewhat less garbled form and another to turn that into the Queen’s English.
   Sounds funny, right? And so it is, in spots, but it plays best on paper. On the screen, the pacing is off, as the filmmakers spend much time establishing characters and situations or repeating jokes too fragile to bear the extra weight.
   The trouble with writing your film after putting in, as Pegg told The Onion, "a 138-film research period" is that you can end up with a glorified Oscar-night montage. Knowing that the countless chase scenes are takeoffs on the "real" ones doesn’t make them any funnier, and when the trim Angel vaults a series of backyard fences and his portly pal lumbers after, you just know Danny’s going to crash through the first one.
   Some of their riffs inject new life into an old tune. When Angel finally warms up to his partner, agreeing to go out to the pub after work, what ensues is a funny, nicely understated spoof of the homosexual subtext underlying buddy movies, as the two go on what amounts to a romantic first date. There’s also a nice variation on that chestnut of running from an impending explosion to dive to safety in the nick of time, like a base runner sliding home.
   But even the clever bits are sometimes overused. At first it’s funny when the camera zooms in and music pulses ominously at the least eventful moments, like when Angel throws his coat onto a hook, but after a while that bit gets as annoying as that living statue.
   The supporting cast is studded with diamonds: James Bond alum Timothy Dalton as a mustachioed villain; Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy as smooth-talking bureaucrats; Billie Whitelaw as a deceptively cheery "hag" with an elaborate updo; Jim Broadbent and Paddy Considine as obdurate small-town cops; Martin Freeman (Tim in the original The Office) and Stephen Merchant (the incompetent agent in Extras) and Cate Blanchett, who makes an uncredited appearance as Angel’s jilted girlfriend, unrecognizable behind a surgical mask. It’s a pleasure to see them all, but a pity most don’t have more to work with.
   "Riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula," Wright told The Onion. "When you watch so much of the (TV shows) and the films that you just think you’ve seen before, it’s kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place."
   You can feel the filmmakers’ enjoyment as you watch the movie, and you want to join in. But in the end, I just couldn’t give it the love it wanted from me. Too silly for a straight cop movie and not funny enough for a comedy, Hot Fuzz is a bust.
Rated R for violent content including some graphic images, and language.