>>REVIEW
HOT FUZZ
STARRING Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Steve Coogan and Timothy Dalton
DIRECTED BY Edgar Wright
Opens Friday, April 20
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Team Shaun of the Dead (a.k.a. director/writer Edgar Wright, actor/writer Simon Pegg and actor Nick Frost) return to North American screens with a vengeance and, in so doing, catapult the Hollywood action paradigm to cheeky new levels.
The endearingly daft and gruesome merging of slacker and romantic comedy with zombies (in Shaun) resulted not only in a new quintessential zombie film, but also a movie that can be regarded on its own as an example of near-flawless contemporary filmmaking. Fortunately for everyone, Hot Fuzz mines its new frontier of Bruckheimer and buddy cops with an equal degree of witty pizzazz. It does for the action film precisely what Shaun did for the zombie movies and raises the bar.
This time around Pegg is Nicholas Angel, a humourless London super cop whose obsessive devotion to upholding the law (his arrest record is 400 per cent higher than anyone else on the force) has seen him reluctantly "promoted" to Sergeant of the seemingly sleepy village of Sandford. Despite an apparent lack of crime, Angel wastes no time in handing out big city justice to the tiny community, arresting underage drinkers while maintaining a vigilant gaze on the otherwise monotonous small town’s existence.
Partnered with him is the hapless but lovable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), whose obsession with American action films like Bad Boys II and Point Break instantly draws him to the steely-eyed Angel, who he views as the personification of a real life "bad boy." Angel, for his part, spends most of the time attempting to quell Danny’s misguided notions that big city policing is all car chases and jumping sideways through the air while firing a gun. However, as "accidents" in the town begin adding up to something sinister, Danny’s full-throttle distractions appear destined to be realized.
Fuzz is an unquestionable success, backed by another brilliantly attuned script from Pegg and Wright and a slew of Britain’s finest character actors all boasting pitch-perfect comedic timing, not to mention the natural chemistry between lifelong friends Pegg and Frost. But, above all else, its success (like Shaun’s before it) is a testament to the admiration these men have for the genres they emulate. The laughs they conjure come from an affectionate reverie, not mockery, of them – and that’s the single biggest difference between these movies and the second-rate parodying found in films like Epic Movie.
Any hack can poke fun at a movie like Die Hard, but it takes skill to draw laughs of affection while simultaneously making a serious contribution to the genre. |
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