Hot Fuzz
— Not caught by the Fuzz: this British parody of American buddy cop movies is rather tepid.”
- Director: Edgar Wright
- United Kingdom, 2007
As far as genre parodies go, any British attempt to do a buddy cop movie would have to make do with American material. That’s what makes Hot Fuzz pleasantly off-kilter, but it’s also what makes the lengthy running time drag horribly as the movie draws to its noisy conclusion.
On his promotion to the rank of sergeant, Nicholas Angel is packed off to police a sleepy country town because his shining record in the Met is making his colleagues look daft. Angel arrives to find everything dismally backward but soon after, a string of murders begins. It really is as simple as that.
There are some genuinely funny moments and Timothy Dalton’s performance is noteworthy, but overall the comedy – squeezed out of the contrast between American cop movies and reserved Englishness – isn’t particularly arresting.
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2 responses so far to Hot Fuzz
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Hello, you. I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name as those guys. I'm a user experience consultant, expatriate, traveller, writer and pro cycling enthusiast.
I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert. I started my website in 2005 and I've been running it ever since.
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Over a year in the making, Dopeology.org is my latest personal project: a topology of doping in thirty years of European pro road cycling.
I collected information from thousands of sources, then I modelled and published it via a lightweight user interface.
September 16th, 2009 at 9:30
Mike, I stumbled upon your site (love it) because of the classic Dreamweaver CS3 “8K bug” fix – thanks for that – but have to disagree with you re Hot Fuzz, if only because, perhaps, it has a very English sense of humour. I take it you’ve seen “Shaun of the Dead”? What did you think of that? What about the TV sitcom “Spaced” which was the progenitor of this particular type of referential comedy?
September 16th, 2009 at 11:08
Hi Ollie,
Thanks for visiting and for your comment. My thoughts on Shaun of the Dead are here:
http://www.mikepadgett.com/reviews/film/shaun-of-the-dead/
I’m very wary of responding in broad strokes about TV comedy because I haven’t actually owned a TV set in nine years. What I’ve seen of TV comedy shows that Britain still has much to be proud of. Certainly we export enough of it to confirm that view: a lot of Europeans here in Brussels know more about Britcoms than I do!
However, I’d be really struggling to say the same of film output and I’m on slightly less shaky ground there. For me, British film comedy rarely works: the writers try rather too hard, the producers have got one eye on foreign distribution and the actors can’t seem to fill the screen.
I’m an Armando Iannucci fan myself and I haven’t seen In the Loop yet, but I’m really hoping it translates well. I’m really into a sort of ‘intricate comedy’ that’s about wordplay and heavy background detail.
The European, English language films that really made me laugh in recent times came from Shane Meadows and Martin McDonagh. Not exactly straight comedy then, but funny nonetheless!