Hot Fuzz

For the last several years, Schenectady has been trying to get a movie theater in the downtown area, as part of an ongoing urban renewal project. This week, it finally opened, and one of the first movies on the bill is Hot Fuzz, from the people who did Shaun of the Dead, which I wanted to see anyway, so I caught a matinee show yesterday.

Simon Pegg plays P.C. Nicholas Angel, the very best cop in London, with an arrest record is 400% better than any other officer's. The problem is, he's making everyone else look bad, so they transfer him to a sleepy little village called Sandford, which has won the "village of the year" contest several years running. Angel turns up at the local constabulary to find it populated with bumbling halfwits, headed by an inspector who turns a blind eye to all sorts of minor lawbreaking, in the service of "The greater good." He's partnered with Danny Butterman, the bumbling and slovenly son of the Inspector (Nick Frost, playing essentially the same character as in Shaun of the Dead).

Soon after Angel's arrival, several local residents die in grisly "accidents," and he begins to suspect that there's something more sinister afoot (the audience is well aware of this, as we see a robed figure committing the murders). He begins working to unravel the connection between the murders, and finds a conspiracy that is both darker and dafter than anyone could've expected. This, in true cop-movie form, requires a massive firefight in the final act, in which all the guns on all the mantles get fired, and everybody's true nature is revealed.

This is best described as a loving spoof of buddy cop movies. To give you an idea of what I mean, there's a scene early in the movie where Danny asks Angel a bunch of questions drawn from cop-movie cliches-- "Have you ever jumped through the air firing two guns at once? Have you ever jumped through the air firing just one gun?"-- and by the end of the movie, they've done every single thing on the list, plus a few that Danny didn't get around to. And every one of those scenes is played straight, just in the context of a very silly plot.

It's a very well done movie, and if you're a fan of cop movies, you'll both laugh with them, and recognize the original sources of about half of the scenes. Pegg and Frost are excellent, and there are some nice turns from the rest of the cast, particularly a really hammy Timothy Dalton as a menacing local grocery magnate and Jim Broadbent as Inspector Frank Butterman.

A couple of brief cautionary notes (which I wouldn't mention, except Kate asked me if I thought she'd like it, so I was thinking about that during the movie): The murder scenes are moderately gory, in a slightly cartoonish way, and they actually do a fairly good job building tension there. The movie also uses a sort of loud montage technique to indicate the passage of time-- a series of quick shots of money being exchanged for beers, for example, or paperwork and mug shots flashing by, with the sound cranked way up. This was mildly annoying to me, and if you're susceptible to motion sickness and the like, I suspect it might give you a blinding headache.

Those are really minor quibbles though. On the whole, it was a whole lot of fun, and I heartily recommend it to fans of action movies, or even non-fans who have seen a bunch of them on cable.