| HE DO THE POLICE (IN DIFFERENT VOICES) : Edgar Wright's 'Hot Fuzz' [8/10] |
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| Sunday, 11 March 2007 | |
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(edited) official synopsis Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is London's finest cop. In fact, he's so good he makes everyone else look bad. As a result, his superiors (Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman) send him to a place where his talents won't be quite so embarrassing - the seemingly crime-free village of Sandford. Once there, he's partnered with the well-meaning but overeager police-officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). The son of the village's amiable police-chief (Jim Broadbent), Danny is a huge action-movie fan and believes his new big-city partner might just be a real-life "bad boy", and his chance to experience the life of gunfights and car chases he so longs for. Angel is quick to dismiss this as childish fantasy, and Danny's puppy-like enthusiasm only adds to Angel's growing frustration. However, as a series of grisly accidents rocks the village, Angel is convinced that Sandford is not what it seems. And as the intrigue deepens, Danny's dreams of explosive, high-octane, car-chasing, gunfighting, all-out action seem more and more like a reality...  review United 93, Children of Men, The Queen, London To Brighton and The History Boys made 2006 a banner year for British cinema, and if Hot Fuzz is any guide the streak isn't over yet. Riotously enjoyable and consistently hilarious, this is that rare commercially-oriented comedy which reaches the two-hour mark without overstaying its welcome. It also breezily disproves the idea that film-makers shouldn't attempt spoofs until they've shown themselves capable of the real thing - writer-director Edgar Wright having previously parodied westerns with his 1994 debut A Fistful Of Fingers, then lovingly homaged George Romero's zombie classics with his belated (and somewhat overrated) followup Shaun of the Dead (2004). Hot Fuzz - which reunites Shaun co-stars Pegg and Frost - is primarily a satire of the Hollywood cop/action movies so beloved by the hapless Butterman Jr. Via Danny's DVD-collection we get to see clips from Bad Boys II and Point Break, and these are only the most prominent of the countless reference-points for what is, on one level, a crowded compendium of in-jokes, quotations and hommages. The scope of Wright's satire extends far beyond American policiers, however: Hot Fuzz spends just as much time and energy on visual and verbal references to myriad horror movies both British and American - especially Straw Dogs and The Wicker Man (whose star Edward Woodward pops up here as an avuncular, community-minded villager.) But whereas The Wicker Man's atmosphere was specifically Scottish and pagan, Hot Fuzz is much more concerned with exploring (exploding?) a particular kind of Englishness. Wright has clearly seen - and memorised - those episodes from The Avengers and The New Avengers in which the respectable-looking residents of twee Home Counties villages reveal themselves as psychotic killers and/or homicidal robots. Older viewers may also be reminded of Alberto Cavalcanti's dizzyingly subversive WWII classic Went the Day Well? (1942), in which a squadron of German soldiers - posing as English tommies - infiltrate a sleepy village. One by one, the locals realise the truth about their visitors, and take drastic steps to repel the intruders: Most extraordinary is a scene in which the postmistress (Muriel George) throws pepper in the eyes of her unwelcome lodger, then finishes him off with an axe. Shortly after, when her telephone call for help is ignored by a gossiping switchboard operator, she meets her own end, on the blade of a bayonet. It's this sudden switch from the tea-sippingly genteel to the weapon-wieldingly berserk which provides Hot Fuzz with many of its most inspired, raucously hilarious moments. The stereotypical 'English village' has, of course, always been a hotbed of barely-suppressed violence: readers of Agatha Christie know that St Mary Mead - picturesque residence of elderly sleuth Miss Marple - had a murder-rate which far eclipsed that of the South Bronx. It's a tradition which has recently been perpetuated by TV shows such as the enormously popular Midsomer Murders - from whose dramatis personae Hot Fuzz's pompous am-dram lothario Blower (David Threlfall) could directly have walked. Threlfall's superbly obnoxious performance as Blower - a fortysomething chap who casts himself as Romeo in his troupe's latest Shakespeare production - is a mini-masterclass in comedy characterisation. Indeed, it's a minor pity that Blower exits so quickly after his entrance: he's messily decapitated in a car crash that's the first of the plot's many 'nasty accidents,' most of them rather unexpectedly gory. (The special effects team have particularly grisly fun with the dispatch of an annoying reporter played by Adam Buxton, his demise partially-inspired by Patrick Troughton's death-by-lightning-rod in The Omen.) In terms of sheer comic value per minute of screen time, Threlfall is perhaps first among equals in what is a large and highly impressive ensemble of British talent (at the head of which Pegg, very wisely, plays things pretty much totally straight). Much credit, therefore, must go to casting-director Nina Gold for the way even the smallest roles are able to yield laughs. She was also responsible for The Illusionist, whose Karl Johnson here steals every scene in which he appears as the village's oldest, most indecipherable, most lecherous copper. The Omen's Billie Whitelaw (as a chatty b&b proprietor) and Paddy Considine (as a moustachioed CID detective) have their moments, though the biggest surprise is perhaps ex-007 Timothy Dalton, who gets to exercise his considerable, long-dormant comic skills as Sandford's dastardly supermarket boss Skinner (current Bond music maestro David Arnold contributes the suitably OTT score.) From start to finish, Wright manages to keep an impressively tight hold on material which in the wrong hands could all too easily have spiralled into self-indulgence or silliness. Hot Fuzz, however, gains momentum as it progresses, thanks to an intricately-constructed script (by Wright and Pegg) that takes great pains to set up its gags long before their satisfying pay-offs. Wright gets away with (a) referencing his own previous pictures, (b) filling the screen with countless (over-)familiar small-screen faces, and (c) including "star cameos" from his celebrity pals Peter Jackson and Cate Blanchett (another showbiz mate, Robert Rodriguez, contributes several original songs to the soundtrack). Then again, so fleetingly do these antipodean interlopers 'appear' that many in the audience may not even be aware of their presence at all. Indeed, you get the feeling when watching Hot Fuzz that there's all sorts of comic detail lurking in the background of scenes that you simply aren't picking up on first view. All the more reason, then, to go back for a second (or even a third) helping of what is such an unexpectedly... arresting experience all round. Neil Young 11th March, 2007 HOT FUZZ : [8/10] : UK 2006 : Edgar WRIGHT : 121 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Empire cinema, Sunderland (UK), 8th March 2007 - public show (paid £5.50)
The visitors glanced at the long boy, who seemed to indicate by a broader stare of his mouth and eyes that in him Sloppy stood confessed. 'For I aint, you must know,' said Betty, 'much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.' The visitors again considered it a point of politeness to look at Sloppy, who, looking at them, suddenly threw back his head, extended his mouth to its utmost width, and laughed loud and long. At this the two innocents, with their brains in that apparent danger, laughed, and Mrs Higden laughed, and the orphan laughed, and then the visitors laughed. Which was more cheerful than intelligible. Then Sloppy seeming to be seized with an industrious mania or fury, turned to at the mangle, and impelled it at the heads of the innocents with such a creaking and rumbling, that Mrs Higden stopped him. 'The gentlefolks can't hear themselves speak, Sloppy. Bide a bit, bide a bit!' |
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