Hot Fuzz: Super Cops

Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's next movie, uses buddy cop action movies as its inspiration. It tells the story of a seasoned London cop who gets transferred to the sleepy town of Sandford where the crime rate is nearly non-existent. He is partnered with the inept son of Sandford's Chief Inspector, and against all odds, the pair eventually becomes friends, as they engage in a battle royale in the middle of town. Sounds trite, right? Like every other buddy cop movie ever made? Ha.

This film's biggest departure from the past works of Wright and Pegg is that Pegg's character Nicholas Angel is the exact opposite of the lazy slacker embodied by Tim and Shaun; Angel is an overachiever whose life is defined by his work. In fact, this is why Angel is forced out of London; he is making all of his fellow officers look bad by comparison, and despite the fact that he's an obvious asset to the force (or the service, since "force" sounds too aggressive), everyone else in the precinct couldn't be happier to be rid of him.

I don't know if the countryside is the English equivalent to the American backwater areas (I mean no disrespect; I'm referring to film stereotypes), but the little town of Sandford seems positively ass-backwards to Angel. The bar serves minors, the local shopkeep looks the other way when a kid shoplifts some candy, the town's only reporter constantly gets his facts wrong, and the police officers barely know what they're doing. Then again, on the surface, it appears as if there is no crime to either show them how to do their jobs or to even require them to do so with competance. At times, it would seem like Angel ended up in Wonderland, since his logic always fell on deaf ears, and people just did things the way they were always done because it was the path of least resistance.

The movie seems to a character study for the first half hour or so, since most of the story follows Angel and his partner, Danny Butterman (as usual, Pegg's partner in, er, crime [?] is played by Nick Frost), as Angel tries to make Danny a better cop while Danny tries to show Angel how to be a real human, as opposed to a supercop. Sadly for Danny though, Angel isn't the supercop that pop culture fans like Danny (and Wright, Pegg and the audience) dreamed of meeting. Instead of going in guns blazing, shooting first and asking questions later, Angel is an extremely by-the-book kind of guy who uses deductive reasoning to solve crimes. Everything Danny knows about police work comes from movies, such as Bad Boys II and Point Break. In one scene, Danny asks Angel if he'd performed various actions, and he proceeds to list nearly every action movie cliche imaginable (pay attention to what he says, since Hot Fuzz, like Shaun, enjoys creative foreshadowing).

Of course, this wouldn't be a very exciting action movie if there weren't any crime. Eventually, various Sandford residents start ending up dead by bizarre circumstances, and the only person who suspects foul play is Angel. Everyone else in town, including the cops, attribute the deaths to freak accidents. As Angel investigates the "accidents", he begins to uncover a conspiracy that reaches deeper into the heart of Sandford than anyone could have possibly imagined. I have to hand it to Wright and Pegg; they sure know how to come up with great and unexpected twists that always make perfect sense in light of all of the evidence.

The ending features some of the best and funniest shoot-out sequences I've ever seen. After what has been a fairly realistic (the shadowy cult is a little out there) cop story, Hot Fuzz is transformed into an over-the-top action flick that has a scene that may make even Tarantino gag (he's a fan of Wright and Pegg's work).

The works of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg work so well because they are both funny and respective to their subject matter. They certainly know where to poke fun at genres, but that is because they know the ins and outs extremely well. Not only that, but their films and television show had actual plots to go along with the gags. The jokes were funny, but the stories could stand on their own if they had to. It's too bad that more comedy/parody writers don't understand this, but the bright side is that it makes these movies all the more funnier.

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