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"Hot Fuzz" is not quite as funny as "Shaun Of The Dead." Some of the big belly laughs are far apart with some big chuckles along the way. All the same, it's one of the more enjoyable movies I have seen recently in the wake of a summer season that has gotten off to a rather dissapointing start. It's main target are the Jerry Bruckheimer action movies of the 90s as well as other action movies like the adrenalin rush that is "Point Break." The movie stars Shaun himself, Simon Pegg, and he plays the best police officer on the London Metropolitan police force - Nicholas Angel. He is such a good officer on the force, holding the record for the most arrests of any officer. So good he is, that his superiors have decided to transfer him to the country. The problem is, he is so good that he makes everyone else look bad in comparison. It's bad for the department's image, and the department heads don't want that. So they end up transferring him to the town of Sanford, which is far off in the countryside where nothing much happens. Sanford is a rather lax town where the police look over such matters as underage drinking and shoplifting. Or at the very least, they don't make any of these people spend more than an hour in jail. Nicholas gets off to a quick start in a hilarious scene where he busts just about everyone in a bar because they are underage. He does the right thing, but he also drives out all of the pub's business. Suffice to say, the owners of the pub are not exactly pleased with this. Whenever Nicholas does something right, being the stiff by-the-book officer he is, he ends up getting punished by doing the most menial duties that an officer can get: being a security guard at a fair or an officer keeping people out of a crime scene while the detectives (completely inept as they are) do their investigation. Along the way, he ends up getting partnered with an overweight and action movie geek named PC Danny Butterman. He is played by Nick Frost in a performance that is pretty much the same one he gave in "Shaun Of The Dead." It's pretty much the same character from the former film, but that's okay because he is still very funny here. He romanticizes of living the life of action that he sees in movies like "Point Break" and "Bad Boys 2." When he meets Nicholas Angel, he thinks that he has come from a city where he has seen that kind of action. But Nicholas comes from a world where police work is nowhere as exciting and bombastic as it is in the movies. It's serious work with very little action. That is, until several "accidents" end up occuring in the town of Sanford. But Nicholas is too smart to pass these events off as accidents when it involves the value of the land and the fact that the evidence does not match up. "Hot Fuzz" is an enjoyable movie throughout, and it never drags. The team of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost are among the top people in the film world of comedy right now. What drives me nuts most of the time is that in comedies, you can see the jokes coming from a mile away. At least I can, and that makes me constantly roll my eyes in severe fustration. Edgar Wright and company are much more clever than that. The jokes and funny moments sneak up on you when you least expect it. I don't want to spoil anything for you, but there are some great gems to found here. There are many movie references which might have gone over the head of some of the people in the audience. How well you can pick them out depends how big of a movie fan you are. The most enjoyable part for me was towards the end where the film turns into the bombastic and explosion filled action spectacular that is your typical Jerry Bruckheimer film these days. Everything blowing up around the characters, all the bad guys shooting guns and many bullets expended, but they somehow keep missing the good guys even when they have a scope on their rifles. Our heroes flying in the air while shooting their guns off like they somehow jumped into a John Woo movie. Seeing a lot of this was a huge kick and had me laughing endlessly. Completely over the top, and the movie does not take itself as seriously as Nicholas Angel takes himself as a police officer. One guy who was great in this movie, and I am glad to see him back in action after what feels like a long time, is Timothy Dalton. He of course is the short lived successor to Roger Moore as James Bond, and one of the more underrated ones if you ask me. He has the driest of roles here as Simon Skinner, whose guilt Nicholas can spot from miles and miles away while all the other police officers in town walk around with blinders over their eyes. That smirk on his face is the one image that stays with me after having left the movie. I got a kick out of this movie, even if it was not quite the big kick I hoped it to be. But forget it, it's Sanford. email this review to a friend
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