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Hot Fuzz has such a simple concept that it’s a wonder no British filmmaker thought of it before.
Take a popular, established, and thoroughly American genre (the action/cop movie), transplant it to the quintessential British setting and sit back and enjoy the jolly decent clash of movie cultures.
Call it Jerry Bruckheimer meets Agatha Christie’s Poirot, though here the laughs are intentional.
Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is Britain’s top cop, so efficient that he embarrasses his superiors and is therefore packed off to the sleepiest village in Britain. Or so it seems.
In true buddy cop fashion, he’s partnered with Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), who’s Angel’s opposite: Slow, oafish and rather dim.
In the idyllic rural setting, Angel deals with neighbourhood watch meetings, shoplifters and the occasional missing swan, which makes for some truly funny sequences.
Then a number of grisly accidents in the village set off a chain of events that lead Angel and Butterman to believe something altogether more sinister is going on.
And the second half of the movie turns into an explosive homage to Tony Scott and John Woo style shootouts and car chases.
Writer-director Edgar Wright clearly reveres the genre and can certainly direct an action sequence, but had he reined it in a bit, he might have shaved a welcome 15 to 20 minutes off the film’s running time.
Still, Hot Fuzz’s pleasure derives from its clever referencing of just about every major US action movie and British cult classic of the past 30 years.
Even playing “spot the cult actor cameo” is fun. Apart from Paul Freeman (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Billie Whitelaw (The Omen) and Timothy Dalton (James Bond), look out for some Oscar-winners.
On a tenth of the budget of the average Hollywood blockbuster, Hot Fuzz is everything that most blockbusters are not: Funny, clever and mostly original.
And it also contains the funniest pratfall in recent memory. - TODAY/fa
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