“Peas and Rice” was that a great film, and full of so many a hidden “Barstool” that you didn’t see them coming. The village perfect, untainted and blooming in brilliance that you wouldn’t expect a “Mother Hubbard” of murders. You might be asking by now what the “funk” am I on about? And what’s with the alternate swearing? The answer, it’s just funnier that way, and Hot Fuzz knows it.
The film provides a unique take on British police and a way to accurate on it’s portrayal of village/small town life. Hot Fuzz subverts the normal, meshing together crime, drama and COMEDY – it’s that good it deserves capitalising, the film revelling in all the dark humour that’s become familiar to Britain.
Join Nicholas Angel, a by-the-book city policeman who’s sent to work in the countryside. At first bored and feeling he’s too good for the place, he soon discovers its darker than London in a blackout.
Hot Fuzz is the second film in the ‘Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy’ of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost – named for the ice creams they eat in the films – but despite being a trilogy you don’t have to have seen the others to enjoy Hot Fuzz (though they’re excellent, so you should). The films being independent of each other (apart from fun easter eggs) and set in completely different universes – Zombies (Shaun of the Dead, 1) and Aliens (The World’s End, 3), while Hot Fuzz is more grounded in realism, being set in a sleepy village town. One that’s welcoming, friendly, but also ankle-deep in disappearances and murder. Just be careful with those gardening shears.
Simon Pegg plays Nicholas Angel; the best police officer there’s ever been, his arrest records so high that he makes everyone else look incompetent, which the criminals, peers and seniors can’t stand. The solution? Send him away to a country town where nothing happens. Thus, Nicholas finds himself in Sandford, but something feels off in the atmosphere of this picture-postcard town/village (being a size somewhere between the two), but no one is listening to him. His new peers beyond stupid, lazy, rude, crude and funny-as-silt, except that is for Danny Butterman…….okay, he’s as stupid and funny as the lot, but he’s not mean. Danny, played by Nick Frost, is as sweet as the Cornetto cones he eats and just as dangerous as well – so not at all. However, Danny has longed for a role model in the police force and sees Nicholas as a real-life action hero, which Hot Fuzz oddly does at the end; with high-octane scenes of tweed-wearing, wax-jacketed and welly-booted villains, while the real victims of this gun-firing spree are the petunias and pansies that are sent-a-flying.
This satirical film has more than just inklings of “Midsomer Murders” and “CSI” combined, (and not just in the number of body counts), but in the ludicrous suspects and victims that couldn’t be made any more like my home village if they tried, oh, there’s an am-dram group that think they’re on Broadway, okay so they can make it more like my village.
Wanting to pay homage to cop-films, whilst also recognising many of the same themes are within action movies, Simon Pegg (who also co-wrote the script), watched a total of one hundred and thirty-eight action films, along with director and fellow writer, Edgar Wright, and with each of the films having some reference to upholding the law. This is probably what makes Hot Fuzz such a great action-comedy for it has the usual tropes of good guys and bad guys, but delivers them with such a dry humour as to embrace them and yet points out their clichés. However, wanting to ensure a degree of truth to the police force, they also interviewed real-life police officers, with some of their lines making it into the film. The end result; balancing shoot-outs with paperwork.
Hot Fuzz is bloody…….funny, and comedically-hyped in relatability, for even if you didn’t grow up in a village, it has the nagging of elders found everywhere, and with the thought that every new generation brings further damage, while teenagers in turn stick up their…….(ahem) let’s say thoughts, hang around in hooded-huddles and think anyone above their age is ancient. Or talk back with ‘what you gonna do?’ and in Nicholas’s case, I’d watch out. Hot Fuzz also transfers a feeling of small country life to the big screen; both in its beauty, fussiness and the limiting of one schoolchild in a shop at any time – otherwise they might just steal all the ice-cream.
Director & Writer: Edgar Wright
Other notable works:
- Last Night in Soho 2021
- Baby Driver 2017
- Ant-Man 2015
- The World’s End 2013
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World 2010
- Shaun of the Dead 2004
- Spaced 1999-2001
Writer: Simon Pegg
Other notable works:
- Truth Seekers 2020 –
- Star Trek Beyond 2016
- The World’s End 2013
- Paul 2011
- Shaun of the Dead 2004
- Spaced 1999-2001
