Hot Fuzz

In the era of Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie and every other vaguely categorized smashup of genre parody, there’s hardly any actual satiric juice to be found amongst America’s big screen spoofs. They’re stupid, unfunny, and utterly redundant attempts at pop culture mockery that rely upon the audience’s already formulated assumptions about a genre and its foreknowledge of recognizable characters. Most have simply sunk to filling their commercially minded minutes with basic caricatures of well-known characters (Jack Sparrow, Borat, etc.) that more or less just behave even more stupidly than they did in their film of origin, as if to suggest that somehow merely accentuating every idiocy in the summer’s biggest blockbusters constitutes entertainment. It doesn’t. The original source material actually makes for better laughs than any filtered, faux funny film of this sort. I can mock Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds on my own. I don’t need David Zucker’s Scary Movie 4 to get that job done.

Why then do I love Hot Fuzz, a buddy cop homage that pokes fun at everything from Point Break to Bad Boys 2? It’s actually pretty simple. Edgar Wright and his collaborator/star Simon Pegg have seen more indulgent action movies than I could ever dream of knowing, and the duo is just plain funnier than I could ever be. Just as they did with Shaun of the Dead, the self-proclaimed zombie romantic comedy (zom-rom-com), Pegg and Wright are playing referential mix masters, juggling chiding yet affectionate portrayals of genre archetypes and clichés with as many tongue-in-cheek acknowledgements of past movie’s as possible. They bring the filmmaking know-how to the sort of conversations all movie freaks have had in the privacy of their own living rooms, making public the laugh out loud dialogue that occurs while love/hating your favorite absurd guilty pleasure film.

In this instance, it’s the epic, ludicrous action flick that’s caught their eye and they very well demonstrate to the audience just how many action movies they’ve seen (I think it’s nearly all of them) as well as just how whip smart they are about laying into their cinematic favorites. Here they’ve reset a typical action premise – an overachieving cop (Pegg) paired with a comic foil bumbler (Edgar Wright) who accidentally uncovers a shocking mystery – and set the whole thing in a quaint little British village in which a dastardly human statue performer who’s “loitering on the streets” is the greatest villain of all since he compromises the perfection and tranquility of this aggressively adorable town.

Unlike Shaun which was mostly just a big bag of laughs, Hot Fuzz does have some semblance of a plot. Of course, it’s as thin and absurd as the worst blockbuster you’ve ever seen (backed by a wonderfully original twist to do with the story’s unconventional setting). The general structure, though, is still mostly just a grab bag of archly crafted scenes stolen from the macho action dude handbook: the first day on the job, the befriending of the goof, the discovery of bodies, the sudden but inevitable betrayal, and such and such. You could probably run off a checklist of what you’d expect to come next and be accurate in your predictions. The fun here is the film’s glorious, semi-serious tone that lets you have all the fun you might have had with a truly bad action film but that also relieves your guilt with some really brilliant comedic interpretations of some atrocious movie conventions. This film is just hilarious and pure fun. Edgar Wright and Pegg are slowly but surely establishing themselves as deserving peers to the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez – directors who can deliver all of the popcorn fun you desire with twice as much gusto and even more creative insight.

Grade: A