The team that brought us Shaun of the Dead has created a worthy follow up with Hot Fuzz. Whereas Shaun was the ultimate zombie movie pisstake, Fuzz is a mixture of parody and homage. Writer/director Edgar Wright and writer/actor Simon Pegg clearly have a love for action movies, and it shows. The film not only includes snippets of Point Break and Bad Boys II, but does its best to duplicate and in fact out-do the action movie clichés we may or may not be aware of. We’re not just talking about flying through the air firing guns or jumping away from explosions – it’s also the little things. For instance whenever someone takes a photo the noise of the flash must be a shocking reverberation, and if someone ever steps up to a microphone there’ll be a moment of ear piercing feedback. Hot Fuzz positively revels in such action movie minutiae.
The film has the biggest British cast this side of Harry Potter, and in the first three minutes alone we get Simon Pegg, Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy in a room together. Bill Bailey, Jim Broadbent, Edward Woodward, Paddy Considine, Timothy Dalton and Stuart Wilson (not related) all appear at one time or another to join Pegg, Nick Frost and other familiar faces from Shaun. Even better, there’s no grandstanding, and all of the actors seem to know their place, which is fantastic.
The editing is practically an extra character in this film, courtesy of Chris Dickens. Regular montages feature rapid fire edited sequences that perfectly capture the idiotic bravado and self importance of the average Hollywood action blockbuster. It does become a little tiring after a while (and especially considering the sound was way too loud in the cinema during my screening), but it’s certainly powerful aspect of the film.
My only complaint with Hot Fuzz, I guess, would have to be the lack of interesting female characters. The only two of any significance are both simply relegated to ‘slut’ roles, and whilst action movies have a proud history of treating women like crap, it doesn’t seem like they were deliberately sending this up here. Rather, they simply didn’t write a screenplay that included women.
It’s hard to anticipate what this team will do next. Hot Fuzz also dabbles in both the horror and western genres, though it’s impossible to say whether they’d explore those realms further. Suffice to say I’ll be looking forward to whatever they do next.