Hot Fuzz

I loved Shaun of the Dead, so I expected that same magical combination of action, humor, and homage in Hot Fuzz. And that's mostly what I got. Mostly.

Simon Pegg is Nicholas Angel, a super cop that is driving the London bobbies mad because he's so good at his job. To keep him out of their hair, the London office sends Angel to a little town known as Sandford. There, he is teamed up with Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), a bit of a slob who wants to be a good cop but learned most of it from watching movies like Point Break and Bad Boys.

Life's pretty boring in Sandford, but there's more than meets the eye. Like every good film made by British blokes, the city folk are secretly suspicious of the common people. And that of course means there's a cult lurking about that must be stopped. It all has something of a Wicker Man feel to it.

The first half of the film is something of a murder mystery, as black clad assailants reminiscent of Scream brutally off witnesses. Once Angel and Butterman discover the truth, the film degenerates into an all out gun-fest, including acrobatics, car chases, foot chases, and wicked one liners.

The problem with Hot Fuzz is that it's shot exactly like Shaun of the Dead, complete with the cut scenes, character dialogue, and gore. Frost is playing almost the exact same character from the first film, except that instead of being a useless drug dealer he's a useless cop instead.

And then there's the gore. I've seen a lot of buddy cop shows and none of them are as disgustingly gory as the murders in Hot Fuzz. It's as if the movie was filmed by horror buffs who like action films, but they didn't know precisely how to create an action film so they went with what they know best - whenever a scene calls for gore, the movie goes way over the top. This includes one victim's head exploding on screen as a church spire drives down into his ribcage (we get to watch him stumble about a few seconds, sans head) and another church spire, this time in miniature, stabbing through a man's throat and up through his tongue and out his mouth. I mean, seriously...Scream wasn't this gross and it was a horror movie.

The movie wraps up with our intrepid cops blowing up a bunch of old people. Which is either hilarious or a little tiresome, depending on what you thought of the film up to that point.

Although the interaction between Angel and Butterman are entertaining, Hot Fuzz's pacing is uneven, which is a shame. Pegg and Wright's enthusiasm for the genre is infectious, but in this case they'd be better off renting cop movies than making one.

Those church spire scenes still give me nightmares. *shudder*