Don't let the terrible, Airplane! knockoff title put you off: Hot Fuzz--a comic riff on explosive "buddy cop" flicks--is a tremendously entertaining film from the folks who brought you the British zombie romantic-comedy Shaun of the Dead.
Simon Pegg (aka Shaun) plays Sgt. Angel, an intense London police officer who's so good at his job that his coworkers ship him off to a sleepy, country village in order to keep him from making the rest of them look bad. His no-nonsense approach clashes with Sandford's locals, whose own approach is to let certain things (underage drinking, for example) slide "for the greater good." However, it earns him the interest of his good-natured but rather thick partner, played by Nick Frost, who has seen far, far too many cop films and peppers him with questions like "Is it true that there's a point on a man's head where if you shoot it, it will blow up?"
Sgt. Angel soon becomes suspicious of events in the town, which hasn't had a recorded murder in 20 years, but which also has a rather high rate of fatal accidents. Sandford joins the roster of offbeat British villages which harbor dark conspiracies, and I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the stars is Edward Woodward, who played an out-of-town cop investigating a sinister community in The Wicker Man.
Hot Fuzz both sends up and embraces the action cop genre, and is surprisingly gory at times, culminating in a lengthy series of shoot-outs and car chases. The mystery is well set-up and signposted throughout, and the film subscribes to the age-old theory that if a disused naval mine is introduced in Act One, it will explode by Act Three.
If the above makes Hot Fuzz sound like a serious action flick, it's really not. There's a lot of character-based humor and out-and-out silliness. And it turns out that the most dangerous felon in Sandford may just be an escaped swan.
Ratings Guide |
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| Zero | What the hell were they thinking? Even Ed Wood was more entertaining. |
| 1/2 |
Dear God in Heaven. Probable involvement of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay. |
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Seriously shit. Based upon a Saturday Night Live skit. |
| 1/2 |
Mildly crap. Eddie Murphy made another family comedy. |
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It's not good. It's not bad. It's just there. |
| 1/2 |
Has its moments. A bonus half star for a particularly cool robot or perky breast. |
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Solid entertainment. Exploding robots and/or multiple bare breasts. |
| 1/2 |
As good as most movies can hope to achieve. May include full-frontal nudity. |
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Like Mary Poppins herself, practically perfect in every way. |
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