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Film%20Critique
Taking Liberties
British spoof team sends up blockbusters

by By Cole Smithey

April 19, 2007

I skipped seeing Blades of Glory because I know all too well its comic formula of hammering away at a single joke for an hour and a half. The makers of Hot Fuzz, and their previous film Shaun of the Dead,

are familiar with such Hollywood recipe pitfalls and know how to smash

cliches together to create original characters speaking irreverent

dialogue around preposterous plot twists with pinpoint abandon.

They deftly sprinkle in elements from action blockbusters, whodunit thrillers, slasher pictures and romantic comedies to give Hot Fuzz a joyous grab bag thrill. It has an egalitarian air that says, “You like fun movies; we like fun movies.”



Gifted screenwriter/actor Simon Pegg is Nicholas Angel, a London

super cop who puts his fellow officers to shame with daily displays of

superior copsmanship that backfire into a Sergeant “promotion” that

comes with a transfer to the small town of Somerset. Keen on keeping

his big city police skills sharp, the humorless Nicholas makes several

arrests on his first night in town, only to discover the next morning

that his temporary prisoner from the night before, Danny Butterman

(Nick Frost), is also his new patrol partner.

Coincidences continue as Danny, an oafish cop-movie fan, is also son

to Chief Inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent), the town’s wily

chieftain. Danny and Frank’s father/son relationship later plays a

significant part in fulfilling the comic duplication of one of Danny’s

favorite action scenes with Keanu Reeves from Point Break.



Pegg plays Nicholas Angel with an intensity that matches the

three-mile squint of Clint Eastwood in his Dirty Harry movies. But Pegg

also brings a modern casualness that is disarmingly appealing for its

understated comic potential. Nicholas is a loner in love with police

work, and the first half of the movie is dedicated to discovering

Nicholas’ disciplined mentality as he relates to members of the

cloistered town’s oddball citizenry.

Murders disguised as deadly accidents are taking the lives of

Sanford residents, and the presence of a shrouded Grim Reaper figure

draws Nicholas and his sidekick Danny to suspect local grocery store

baron Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton) of being a serial killer. As the

grotesque nature of the apparently random murders escalates, so too

does the blood and bullets spectacle that rivals gnarly

action-thrillers like Bad Boys II, a movie referenced in one of Danny’s rants about great cop movies.



Over the course of two pictures, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz,

director Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have forged a British cottage film

industry based on creating energized genre spoofs. Their solid

achievements beg a question that Hollywood should be asking itself

about the validity of remaking films, as opposed to generating movies

that condense and blend genre formulas.

There’s nothing new under the sun, but Wright and Pegg are pumping

new life into cinema with comedies that wear their influences on their

sleeves. Their approach isn’t far from Woody Allen’s early films that

paid a huge debt to the Marx Brothers movies.

Hot Fuzz runs about 10

minutes too long, apparently because the filmmakers were having too

much fun to know when to quit. There are certainly far worse problems

to be had with most movies playing at your local multiplex. MTW