Hot Fuzz ★★★★
HOW good is Hot Fuzz? Bloody good.
Edgar Wright’s 2007 film has one of the best action/comedy premise ever, a phenomenal cast, is laugh-out-loud and delivers the goods in both genres.
What if you blended a Michael Bay ‘Bad Boys’ style action movie with Dixon of Dock Green. That’s a gentle, 1950s British police series for those who don’t know.
To put it another way – let’s make The Bill on steroids.
Officer Nicholas Angel, played wonderfully by Simon Pegg, is a pain in the arse; a loner, a stickler for the rule book, disliked by all his colleagues.
But he’s also the London Metropolitan Police’s most decorated and productive officer with an arrest rate second to none, wounded in the line of duty twice.
The brass decide to get rid of Angel because he is making everyone else look bad. They promote him to Sergeant and send him to a rural backwater where the biggest case of the week is a missing swan.
Angel makes his mark before he has even started work in the new job by emptying the local pub of all the under-age drinkers, leaving himself reading the paper and having a cranberry juice as the only punter left, much to the landlord’s annoyance.
Once Angel starts work he becomes completely frustrated by the lack of motivation amongst the other officers in the station who work their days around tea breaks and lunch at the pub.
The only one who seems to care at all is PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) who is obsessed with Hollywood films like Bad Boys and Point Break but has absolutely no idea about real policing.
Suddenly people start to die in horrifying ways and, while most of their colleagues try to explain things away as accidents, Angel and Butterman realise actual, major crime may be descending on the quiet little town.
Wright’s juxtoposition of the rural setting and sensibilities with shocking murders and action chase scenes, all delivered with quick-fire editing and dialogue is a joy to watch. It also has one of the best British casts in recent memory, all at the top of their game right down to the smallest cameo.
Hot Fuzz is one of those comedies that live on constant rotation.