Review - Hot Fuzz

These days, hit British comedy films tend to be written by Richard Curtis and make you want to scratch your own eyes out in an attempt to get Keira Knightley’s smug face out of your brain. It is refreshing, therefore, to witness the movie success of Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright. I was a huge fan of their sit-com Spaced (which was co-written by Jessica Stevenson), and with the track record of TV comedians in film so bad, it’s great that their first film Shaun of the Dead was an international hit. The follow-up Hot Fuzz more than lives up to expectations. Like Shaun, it slams genre movie conventions in the middle of Middle England, producing ample room for spoofery. This time they’ve put gun-toting, car-chasing cops in a Gloucestershire village.

Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the Met’s top cop. He’s a perfect shot, very enthusiastic about following the rules, and has an arrest record that puts all the other officers to shame. His superiors get rid of their embarrassment by posting him to the middle of nowhere, the quiet village of Sandford in the West Country. After a series of mysterious (and extremely gory) accidental deaths, Angel’s fish-out-of-water soon finds out that it is not as quiet as it first seems.

Hot Fuzz is a whole lot of fun; they’ve tied all the gags around a reasonable storyline that keeps things moving along. Simon Pegg is suitably serious as the straight man, and Nick Frost (obviously playing the sweet and stupid best friend. Obviously.) is lovely as PC Danny Butterman. Almost everyone from the British comedy scene seems to make cameos in this, with my particular favourite being Olivia Coleman (Sophie off of Peep Show, and Bev of the Trev and Bev AA adverts) as a saucy female police officer. Timothy Dalton does a great moustache-twirling turn as a deliciously malevolent and highly suspicious Somerfield manager. But although I wanted to love it, I only liked it. I think this is just because I love Spaced so much that nothing seems to live up to it; maybe I liked Jessica Stevenson’s contribution more than Pegg’s without knowing it. But this is my own personal hang-up, and it was genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, which I suppose is all you can ask for a comedy. This is British film comedy made for and by geeks, something which can only be applauded.