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The brilliant minds behind Shaun of the Dead successfully take a shot at the buddy cop genre with Hot Fuzz . The result is a bitingly satiric and hugely entertaining parody.

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Edgar Wright

Nicholas Angel

Danny Butterman

Jim Broadbent

Inspector Frank Butterman

Paddy Considine

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Movie Review | 'Hot Fuzz'

Banished to the Country, a Too-Good Cop Finds an Action-Movie Parody

By Manohla Dargis

• April 20, 2007

The wits behind the controlled chaos that is “Hot Fuzz,” a parody of Hollywood-style action flicks, wield a somewhat heavier comic cudgel than they did in their last big-screen outing, the zombie caper “Shaun of the Dead.” This time, as they say in the blow-up business, it’s personal, or at least somewhat personalized, since the more obvious targets here include high-octane producer-auteurs like Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver, who, with their fat budgets and armies of heavily armed bad boys, have helped define the modern action spectacular, reshaping the old kiss-kiss, bang-bang movie experience into the cinema of lock-and-load.

Simon Pegg, the snub-nosed, cricket-bat-swinging blond avenger of “Shaun of the Dead,” plays Nicholas Angel, a crack London police officer who’s bounced to a small town by his inferior superiors (Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman, smirking and smiling) for being just too damn good at his job. Banished to the sticks, where a missing snow-colored swan initially proves the only investigative distraction, he finds himself desperate for action. He rousts some teenagers from the local pub, but outside of fielding smutty insults from the precinct’s layabout detectives (Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall, as matching and mustachioed as a Tom of Finland cartoon), there’s little to do but water his lily plant and nurse his cranberry juice nightcap.

There are few girls allowed inside the Bruckheimer and Silver clubhouses, and so it is here. Although the homosocial worlds of Messrs. Bruckheimer and Silver on occasion make room for a Venus in leather like Carrie-Anne Moss or, more routinely, a neonatal-size waif like Keira Knightley, these are testosterone-fueled domains, largely defined by bulging muscles and exploding guns, both symbolic and actual. It’s a world that Mr. Pegg and the film’s director, Edgar Wright, who together wrote the awfully funny screenplay, know intimately and recreate with admirable fealty, from the hard-crashing edits to the soft, tender looks exchanged by Angel and his slavishly attentive sidekick, Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). It’s a world in which boys will be boys at every available opportunity.

For the most part these are fine boys indeed, and in the wonderful, weird case of Timothy Dalton, an unctuous toff with a menacing twinkle in his eye, even better than that. (Look for the director Peter Jackson in an eye-blink cameo.) Mr. Pegg and Mr. Frost, who played best buddies in “Shaun of the Dead,” have an easy, believable rapport that, once it gets cooking, opens up a pocket of sweetness in a film that is otherwise played cool and for laughs. Mr. Pegg’s performance here, befitting his uptight, upright character, is somewhat one-note, if otherwise likable, with little of the Everyman depths that were finally tapped in “Shaun.” The emotional intimacy of Mr. Pegg and Mr. Frost’s onscreen relationship suggests that there’s more to these performers than parody.

A wee bit of plot tucked amid a fusillade of film-geek jokes and charming nonsense, bang-bang, hee-hee, “Hot Fuzz” trots out the predictable verbal and visual allusions to modern Hollywood action movies great and forgettable, hitting the highs (“Point Break”) right along with the lows (“Bad Boys II”). The meta-movie silliness works well enough for the crisp setup. But since Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies (see “Con Air” ad infinitum), they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports (see “Calendar Girls” ad nauseam) to one of the most absurd American ones.

Think of it as “The Full Monty” blown to smithereens.

“Hot Fuzz” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Big bangs, hard oaths.

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Edgar Wright; written by Mr. Wright and Simon Pegg; director of photography, Jess Hall; edited by Chris Dickens; music by David Arnold; production designer, Marcus Rowland; produced by Nira Park, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner; released by Rogue Pictures. Running time: 121 minutes.

WITH: Simon Pegg (Nicholas Angel), Nick Frost (Danny Butterman), Jim Broadbent (Frank Butterman), Paddy Considine (Andy Wainwright), Timothy Dalton (Simon Skinner), Anne Reid (Leslie Tiller), Rafe Spall (Andy Cartwright), Billie Whitelaw (Joyce Cooper), Edward Woodward (Tom Weaver), Bill Nighy (Chief Inspector), Martin Freeman (Sergeant) and Steve Coogan.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

An overachieving London police sergeant is transferred to a village where the easygoing officers object to his fervor for regulations, all while a string of grisly murders strikes the town. An overachieving London police sergeant is transferred to a village where the easygoing officers object to his fervor for regulations, all while a string of grisly murders strikes the town. An overachieving London police sergeant is transferred to a village where the easygoing officers object to his fervor for regulations, all while a string of grisly murders strikes the town.

• Edgar Wright
• Martin Freeman
• 944 User reviews
• 308 Critic reviews
• 81 Metascore
• 2 wins & 9 nominations

• Nicholas Angel

• PC Danny Butterman

• Met Sergeant

• Met Chief Inspector
• 'Not' Janine

• Bernard Cooper

• Joyce Cooper

• Mary Porter
• Underage Drinker #1
• Underage Drinker #2
• Underage Drinker #3

• Sergeant Turner

• Rev. Philip Shooter
• Greg Prosser
• Sheree Prosser
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The first draft of the script included a love interest for Nicholas named Victoria. She was cut from subsequent drafts, but a good amount of her dialogue was given to Danny, often without any changes.
• Goofs In the final car chase, the green screen is visible in many of the shots of Nicholas and Danny's car.

DS Andy Wainwright : You do know there are more guns in the country than there are in the city.

DS Andy Cartwright : Everyone and their mums is packin' round here!

Nicholas Angel : Like who?

DS Andy Wainwright : Farmers.

Nicholas Angel : Who else?

DS Andy Cartwright : Farmers' mums.

• Crazy credits Both the dog and the swan featured got listed in the credits.
• Alternate versions In Singapore, the theatrical release was altered in order to obtain an NC16 classification after the original version of the film was passed with an M18 rating. These changes implemented to the film removed some stronger instances of violence.
• Connections Featured in Friday Night with Jonathan Ross: Episode #11.11 (2006)
• Soundtracks Goody Two Shoes Written by Adam Ant , Marco Pirroni Performed by Adam and the Ants Courtesy of Sony BMG Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd.

User reviews 944

• Oct 11, 2007
• How long is Hot Fuzz? Powered by Alexa
• Which NWA members actually killed Martin Blower, Eve Draper, George Merchant, Tim Messenger and Leslie. Tiller?
• What is Hot Fuzz about?
• Is 'Hot Fuzz" based on a book?
• April 20, 2007 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Working Title Films (United Kingdom)
• The Crown Pub, Wells, Somerset, England, UK (The Crown pub)
• Universal Pictures
• StudioCanal
• Working Title Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• £8,000,000 (estimated)
• $23,637,265
• Apr 22, 2007
• $80,578,470

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 1 minute
• Dolby Digital EX

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Hot Fuzz Review

14 Feb 2007

NaN minutes

It’s a tricky thing, a cult hit. How do you follow it up? Do you ride the hype, go Hollywood and risk being called a sell-out? Or stay small and potentially confine yourself to ‘Also Out’ columns for the rest of your days? The Shaun Of The Dead team has aimed for a point precisely between the two, and if they haven’t quite hit the bullseye, they’ve come extremely close.

Hot Fuzz has a much harder job to do than Shaun. Zombies overrunning the suburbs and being fought off by a pair of layabouts armed only with arrested development and on-demand flatulence is an obviously ripe idea. Big-city policeman gets sent to the leafy land of cream teas and women’s institutes? It all sounds a bit too Heartbeat to get the heart racing. Fuzz never quite achieves the boundless creativity of Shaun, but Wright and Pegg throw every joke they have at the concept until they tickle the audience into giddy submission.

The vast share of the appeal is down to the laidback chemistry between Pegg and Frost. After almost a decade together they’re clearly so comfortable in each other’s presence that they feel no need to fight for the punchline, making them terrific company for two hours. It’s initially strange to see eternal pratfaller Pegg playing the straight man, and the first 20 minutes pass slightly sluggishly as we’re introduced to his Nicholas Angel, the kind of humourless jobsworth you’d studiously avoid at the office party. Alone he’s a bit of an irritating do-gooder, but once he meets bumpkin officer PC Danny Butterman (Frost), his dull stoicism becomes the perfect comic foil for Frost, who effortlessly trundles off with the show.

Danny is an endearing, pie-eyed, sugared-up puppy of a man, packed tightly with one-liners that you’ll be quoting long after your friends have stopped speaking to you because you won’t shut the hell up.

Wright and Pegg’s talent with incidental character quirks extends to the rest of the villagers; they may be archetypes, but they’re very funny archetypes. Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall get a lot of mileage out of relatively little screen time as a pair of bellicose inspectors; Anne Reid turns a single vocal tic into one of the film’s best scenes and Timothy Dalton is so sneeringly, uproariously suspicious that he might as well be twirling his moustache, stroking a white cat and ending all his lines with “Mwa-ha-ha”. We could go on, but word counts forbid.

Wright is not just in this for the comedy, however; he wants to be an action director too. He’s certainly far from a slouch in this department, but by boldly referencing the films of Michael Bay, Tony Scott and Kathryn Bigelow he’s setting himself a high benchmark — okay, maybe marginally less so with Bigelow. He strikes a confident balance between the laughs and stunts, and his action hits have plenty of bang and flashy editing, but he does lack the ultra-cool ‘I wish I was that guy’ moments that mark out a great action set-piece. Yet if Hot Fuzz can only boast of being a good action movie, it is confidently a great comedy.

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Alien: Romulus Is Even More Exciting After New Movie With 81% On Rotten Tomatoes

The perfect way to make sicario 3 is sadly impossible now, what happened to post's version of the pop-tart: are country squares still sold today, a fantastic send-up of loner cop action hero movies, with a final half hour that makes it the funniest thing i've seen this year..

Hot Fuzz is the funniest movie that most people haven't seen this year. Sure, everyone is fawning over Superbad , which was OK, but if you're an action movie fan, especially of stuff along the lines of Die Hard or Lethal Weapon you really need to see this movie.

Hot Fuzz was made by the same folks who showed us that zombies could be funny in Shaun of the Dead . It stars Simon Pegg (who co-wrote the script) and Nick Frost. They were the same on-screen team in Shaun . Here Pegg plays officer Nicholas Angel, a by the book, excels-at-everything-he-does officer who is so good that he's making the rest of the London police force look bad in comparison (his arrest rate is 400% higher than the next highest). Due to this, his superiors decide to ship him off to the small village of Sandford, where the crime rate is ridiculously low and the citizens are proud of it's designation as Village of the Year.

Angel brings his tough, no-nonsense view of the law to the sleepy little town, and the welcome he receives soon turns to annoyance and ridicule by the townsfolk. A series of murders are interpreted to be accidents by the existing police force, with the two town detectives continually accusing Angel of trying to see a crime where none exists. He is teamed up with the police chief's son Danny Butterman - a portly and overeager fellow who fantasizes about the sort of police action seen in Point Break and Bad Boys II .

The first 3/4 of the film is funny in a low-key, subtle way. Much of the humor is derived by the counterpoint of the overly serious performance of Pegg as Angel in the face of the existing officers of Sandford who all play their roles for goofy laughs. Also, casting the diminuitive Pegg as a hard-boiled super-cop is funny in and of itself. But where the movie really breaks loose and gets it's legs is in the final 30 minutes or so when it goes into full-on cop movie parody mode. There are more references to previous films here than I could count, but the vision of Nick Angel riding through town on horseback armed to the teeth was really funny, and his shoot-out with the local townsfolk left me in stitches. :-)

One-time James Bond Timothy Dalton is also in the film and does a great job of portraying a smarmy businessman with the all the charm of a used car salesman.

Be warned that it's rated R for a reason, with a few fairly gruesome scenes and plenty of foul language that instead of seeming superfluous is actually used to great effect.

I'm really shocked that this film didn't do better here in the U.S. - perhaps people just don't get the (sometimes) more subtle British humor and are more open to the more direct (and crass) humor in movies like Superbad . It's a shame more folks didn't get out and see this one, but now that it's out on DVD I highly recommend you check it out.

Go check it out and let me know what you thought of it!

Our Rating:

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• Action/Adventure , Comedy , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Simon Pegg as Sergeant Nicholas Angel; Nick Frost as Police Chief Danny Butterman; Jim Broadbent as Inspector Frank Butterman; Timothy Dalton as Simon Skinner

Home Release Date

• Edgar Wright

Distributor

• Rogue Pictures

Movie Review

Nicholas Angel was made for police work. He shoots right to the top of his class at the Academy and soon becomes an exemplary officer. So exemplary, in fact, that he makes everyone else look bad. So his superiors ship him off to the sleepy little village of Sandford.

The English country folk are somewhat more laidback than the go-get-’em cop. Police Chief Butterman appreciates his dedication, but suggests he slow his pace to avoid a nervous breakdown. Nick’s only supporter is the police chief’s son, Danny, a lazy, junk-foodaholic cop who’s excited about partnering with the newcomer and wants to know about all his exploits in London. Danny isn’t much of an officer, but he has been inspired by hundreds of action movies such as Point Break and Bad Boys II , and he dreams of leaping into action, dispensing bullets and witty repartee.

Nick keeps a sharp eye out, but chasing an escaped swan seems to be the only action in the sleepy burg. Then people start dying in grisly accidents. And the sleuthing sergeant realizes that Sandford may have the lowest crime and murder rates in the country, but its “accidental” death rate is off the charts.

Positive Elements

Nick is a dedicated officer who goes out of his way to follow the rule of law and do what’s right. At one point a man is threatening people with a pistol and Nick uses his body to shield a young boy. While failing at general police work, Danny proves himself to be a good friend. When Nick is being fired upon, Danny steps out of a place of safety and runs to fight by his friend’s side. He also dives in front of Nick and takes a gun blast for him.

Spiritual Elements

Whenever the police officers use foul language around the station house, they are required to drop a coin in the “swear box.” The proceeds are donated to the local church. The town holds a public raffle to help pay for a new church roof. Nick is asked to speak at church but he demurs because of his lack of belief. A killer dresses in a cloaked druid’s robe. Several town members also dress in these same robes and chant in Latin. The reverend pulls a gun, shoots a man, swears and profanes Jesus’ name.

Sexual Content

It is implied that Doris, the sole female on the Sandford force, is sexually promiscuous. (She makes a number of wisecracks to that effect.) Doris also makes a few off-color comments about some of the accident victims, motivating an older officer to blurt out crude sexual remarks.

Beyond showing a little cleavage, Doris wears a formed plastic top to a party that looks like bare breasts. The local store owner mentions that his assistant moonlights as a table dancer. Two actors kiss in a stage play and later in their dressing room.

Violent Content

Hot Fuzz uses over-the-top violence as a way to elicit laughs. And in doing so, soaks audiences with gory, intensely bloody scenes that appear very realistic. When a peaked piece of masonry is broken off the roof of an old church and dropped to the ground below, it falls point-first and obliterates the head of a man, driving all the way down through his neck and into his upper body. Likewise, another unfortunate soul falls on a model of a church, and the spire drives up through his chin and sticks out through his mouth. (He talks with it jammed there.)

A woman is stabbed in the chest with garden shears and staggers about spurting blood. A man and woman are decapitated with an axe and we see their heads lying in the road. A man is hit in the head and his house is blown up (tossing his charred remains into the street). Nick jumps over a fence to stop an old woman who’s trying to shoot him. He kicks her in the face and she falls backward. (We see her later with a bloody face.) A large man batters and bloodies Nick, throwing him around a bedroom and through the aisles of a store. Nick hits a kid in the head with a can of spray paint. Danny accidentally shoots a man at a carnival with an air gun. Nick holds a large knife to a man’s throat. A man is shot in the foot when a shotgun hits the ground and discharges.

[ Spoiler Warning ] A battle breaks out in the streets of Sandford with thunderous shots and explosions. Nick and Danny jump in and out of cover with guns blazing. Bullets destroy building fronts and interiors, shatter store cases and blow out windows. Several people are shot and wounded.

Danny fakes poking his eye out with a fork and uses ketchup to simulate blood.

Crude or Profane Language

Over 20 f-words (including at least one use of “m—–f—er”) and about 10 s-words are scattered throughout the film along with a handful of other profanities such as “a–,” “d–n” and “h—.” Obscene slang (the strongest terms possible) are assigned to sex acts as well as male and female body parts. Jesus’ name is profaned.

Drug and Alcohol Content

All of the Sandford police officers, at one time or another, drink wine or pints of beer in the local pub. Nick and Danny become inebriated. Danny almost backs his vehicle over Nick while driving drunk. A drunken man falls down and then stumbles away from the bar to urinate in the corner of the room. Nick mentions an uncle who sold drugs to children. Officers smoke in several scenes.

Other Negative Elements

Nick breaks up with a woman at the beginning of the movie, but it’s never revealed if the two were married.

Hot Fuzz was created by the same team that gave birth (and living death) to the zombie-flick spoof, Shaun of the Dead. This time around, they grab their .44 Magnums and take aim at the American buddy-cop genre.

Fuzz adopts a straight-faced approach to movie formula, in-jokes and clichés worthy of a suitcase full of action movies. But it aims higher (or lower, depending on your perspective) than the broad goofy slapstick that we’ve become accustomed to from genre spoofs. This pic is as much a homage to American action flicks as it is a spoof, blending dry British wit with heavy, kick-to-the-face, fall-sideways-while-unloading-your-automatic-weapon action.

That high-powered tip of the hat (which reveals a smirk underneath) also includes excessive and outrageous gore, as mentioned earlier. The filmmakers try to use the unexpectedly vicious bloodletting as a humorous device, but you’re too busy grimacing to smile. And unlike Shaun of the Dead , which at least offered viewers some sort of metaphorical subtext to consider in between splatters, Hot Fuzz appears to be all about assault.

In our current cultural environment of daily newscasts devoted to body counts and campus gunmen, do we really need another reason to wince? Another reason to wonder whether or not violent entertainment aids and abets real-life tragedies?

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Hot Fuzz Is A God Damned Masterpiece

The best movies get better each time you watch them. That is why I am now going to praise the 2007 cinematic masterwork Hot Fuzz .

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A couple of nights ago, I saw that the movie was on Netflix. Of course, I promptly rewatched it. You know what? It’s not just one of the best comedies of all time, it’s one of the best movies of all time. Put it up there with Casablanca and The Godfather . Strong praise, I know!

[This post originally ran on April 23, 2015]

Directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and his longtime leading man/collaborator Simon Pegg, Hot Fuzz was released almost eight years ago. It got very positive reviews , and I remember being pretty hyped to see it. I had loved their film Shaun of the Dead , and couldn’t wait to see those guys take on the buddy cop genre. I had seen maybe one trailer and was mostly going off of the poster:

If Shaun of the Dead was Dawn of the Dead , Hot Fuzz would be Bad Boys II . Makes sense, right? Kinda. But also kinda not.

From the beginning, Hot Fuzz subverts the audience’s expectations. It begins not with a bang but with a long shot of Pegg’s character Nicholas Angel slowly walking toward the camera. Then comes a montage about what a splendid cop he is.

There are a bunch of fake-outs going on there. Pegg is playing against type—before Hot Fuzz he’d been primarily known as a likable slacker like Shaun from Shaun of the Dead or Tim from Spaced . Here, he was playing a cheerless, uptight civil servant. He’s not the sort of devil-may-care renegade popularized by Cop Cinema, he’s the straightest arrow on the force. He is so straight, in fact, that the brass at the London Police Department have decided to reassign him to the country and get him out of the way.

Soon, Angel has been relocated to the country town of Sandford. That sets up the second fake-out: Hot Fuzz isn’t just a buddy-cop movie, it’s a proper Agatha Christie-style mystery. The first time I watched it, I assumed that the colorful populace of Sandford were merely window dressing, a chance for the film to swell its cast with every working British comedian on Earth. (Which it does, of course.)

Sgt. Angel is frustrated by the willingness of the police force to write off a series of increasingly suspicious deaths as “accidents” and begins unraveling a complex real-estate scheme that links the victims. It’s a plausible mystery, and it implicates the most obvious villain in the movie—Timothy Dalton’s wonderful and dastardly shop-owner Simon Skinner.

Spoiler Warning: I’m about to give away the movie’s big twist. So maybe make sure you’ve watched it and then come back.

Dalton is a red herring that makes the eventual reveal—a “ Final ending of Clue ” sort of deal where it turns out the entire town is in on it —funnier, particularly because the actual motives for the murders are so absurd. That guy wasn’t killed for poaching a land deal, he was killed because his house was an eyesore. That woman wasn’t killed in a real-estate scam gone wrong, she simply had an annoying laugh. Skinner is in fact guilty, but so is everyone else.

When you go into Hot Fuzz knowing the twist, everything changes. Rewatching it is almost like watching a different movie, and it’s also where the whole “this movie is a masterpiece” thing comes in.

For starters, Hot Fuzz has one of the richest, tightest scripts of any film I’ve seen. Hot Fuzz is so dense with gags that if you lean over to refill the popcorn bowl, you’ll miss four or five of them. Nearly every line of dialogue is either an explicit joke, a set-up to a future joke, or a call-back to a joke that was set up earlier. Some manage to be all three at once. It’s like watching an entire season of Arrested Development unfold in two hours.

The self-referential stuff is what sticks out to me each time I rewatch it. That makes sense, since so much of the film plays differently once you know what’s really going on. Most fans of the film probably remember the foreshadowing where Angel meets Joyce Cooper, the woman at the inn: She seems to call him a “fascist,” revealing after a pregnant pause that that’s just a word for the crossword she’s working on.

“Hag,” Angel appears to call her in response… before pointing to another entry on her crossword.

Much later, when the guns have come out and the two characters are shooting at each other, the insults come back in earnest. “Fascist,” Joyce spits, opening fire with a machine gun. Sgt. Angel returns fire, quickly taking her down. “Hag.”

There are so many subtle jokes like that that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. The first time Angel and his partner Danny enter the neighborhood shop, he overhears one of the women in the Neighborhood Watch Alliance on the radio telling the shopkeeper, “That Sergeant Angel’s in your shop, check out his arse!” Later, as he rides back into town to lay down the law, he overhears the same woman saying, “That Sergeant Angel’s back… check out his horse!”

Lines are delivered rhythmically, mixing quick repetition with snappy edits to keep the viewer off-balance and amused. Characters bounce lines to one another like handball players, and almost every line of dialogue and visual gag is eventually repeated in a different context. “That weren’t me.” “She tripped and fell on her own shears.” “A great bushy beard!” “The greater good.” “Pub?” “Yarp.”

The rampaging swan is one of the movie’s most obvious running gags. See, there’s a swan loose in Sandford, and Danny and Angel must apprehend it. They don’t catch it on their first outing, so it turns up at key moments throughout the film. The bird plays a crucial role in the final showdown. When Inspector Butterman tries to make his final getaway, it’s the swan, not the heroes, that brings him down.

There are more subtle references to the swan threaded through the script. When Angel and Danny return from their first unsuccessful attempt to capture the it, they’re suitably embarrassed. “No luck finding them swans, then?” asks woman at the shop. “It’s just the one swan, actually,” comes Danny’s reply.

Later, Angel has abandoned his murder investigation. He and Danny are back in the shop buying Cornettos. That earlier line finally echoes: “No luck finding them killers, then?” asks the clerk. “It’s just the one killer, actually,” replies Danny. Hearing that, Angel finally has his epiphany—it’s not one killer, it’s several.

That epiphany sets up what might be my favorite visual gag in the entire movie. Sgt. Angel is eating his Cornetto and stewing over what Danny just said, and he finally puts it all together. He turns to Danny with his mouth covered in ice cream and tells him to punch it. Danny, for some reason, decides to wolf down his Cornetto before hitting the gas.

Every time I see that scene, I laugh. I’m laughing right now, looking at the gif.

As much praise as the script deserves, the movie’s visual humor is just as good. The primary visual joke is that Hot Fuzz apes the smash-cuts and hyperactive visuals popularized by Michael Bay—call it “ Bayhem ,” if you want—but uses those techniques to punctuate scenes of extreme mundanity. The disconnect between the editing and camerawork and the actual events on-screen is good for a grin—SMASH CUT TO a cop preparing to do paperwork…. EXTREME CLOSE-UP ON a man watering a plant.

As the story progresses, those jokes get more specific and pronounced. One of my favorites comes after Danny and Angel uncover a cache of weapons at the farm outside town. Among the guns and grenades they find a rusty old sea-mine. They prod it. It begins ticking. They flee the building, which leads to this shot:

It’s a perfect recreation of a shot we’ve seen in a hundred action movies. The camera sweeps out, tracking quickly backwards as the heroes flee a building. The moment the whole building is in the shot…. BOOM, it explodes, propelling them forward and just out of harm’s way. The punch line, of course, being that the mine doesn’t actually explode. We get that great shot, but none of the payoff.

In its last quarter, Hot Fuzz finally becomes the guns-blazing, full-on Michael Bay parody we were promised. I’ve always felt a touch let down by this part of the movie, mostly because the script makes a few shortcuts that fall short of the precedent set by everything leading up to them. (Angel immediately convinces the other cops that Inspector Butterman is evil despite the fact that they’ve mocked him for the entire film, the pacing finally starts to get a bit out of hand, the last five minutes should’ve been cut.)

The action sequences have so many good gags that I’m willing to forgive a few minor missteps. There’s the little stuff, like the fascist/hag joke I mentioned earlier, or the fact that the old guy in the big puffy jacket really was carrying a shotgun under it this entire time.

The grand finale is also loaded with explicit Michael Bay tributes. There’s the camera rotating around our heroes…

…the two of them leaping through the air while dual-wielding pistols:

…there’s the off-kilter, airborne car that enters from the top of the frame in extreme slow-mo…

…and there’s the pull-back shot of the heroes looking up as a helicopter flies into the frame:

One of the biggest criticisms of Michael Bay-style filmmaking is the constant, frantic editing. No shot lasts more than a second, and most are in and out in a fraction of that time. It’s one of those things that I’ve found difficult to unsee; the moment I realized that no Michael Bay action sequence holds a shot, I became unable to focus while watching his movies.

The action in Hot Fuzz goes for something similar, and while it must be said that Edgar Wright and his editor, Chris Dickens, aren’t as good at it as Bay and his team, the joke still works, particularly in its more extreme examples. One of my favorite visual gags is actually pretty easy to miss. It’s this one:

Dr. Hatcher has Danny and Angel dead to rights. He pumps a round into the chamber of his shotgun… and Wright and Dickens cram an incredible number of quick-cuts into that single quick motion. Check it out in slow-mo:

Eight different camera angles! For an action that takes about one second. It might be the best Michael Bay joke in the whole movie.

Early in the story, Danny is peppering Sgt. Angel with questions about his action-packed tenure as a London policeman-officer. Has he ever smoked a fool? Has he ever been in a high-speed chase? Has he ever fired his gun up into the air and gone “arrrrrrrr!”?

Danny demonstrates what he’s talking about—it’s a scene from Point Break where Keanu Reeves has a clear shot at Patrick Swayze’s bank robber but just can’t do it because he and Swayze have become surf bros. Instead, Keanu empties his clip into the air and cries out in frustration.

No, Angel says, he’s never done that.

Later, Danny and Angel bond over a drunken, late-night viewing of Point Break and Bad Boys II . We even get to watch them as they watch the scene in question:

So of course, at the end of the movie, Danny finds himself with a clear shot on his evil lunatic father. And just like Keanu, he can’t do it:

That’s Hot Fuzz . It’s a movie so rich that it pulls threads from other movies and weaves them into itself, eventually doubling and even tripling back. Not a second is wasted; every joke eventually ricochets and hits you when you didn’t expect it.

It’s operating on a different level of sophistication from the films to which it pays tribute, but that tribute is genuine: Hot Fuzz believes in the power of dumb action movies, and it delivers on that belief straight through until the credits roll. It’s one of the smartest, funniest, most rewarding movies I’ve seen. Hot Fuzz is a god damned masterpiece.

To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] .

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Movie Review: Hot Fuzz (2007)

• General Disdain
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• --> May 4, 2007

Hot Fuzz is the highly anticipated movie from the team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg that created “Shaun of the Dead.” Whereas Shaun twisted and made light of the zombie genre, Hot Fuzz pokes fun at the cop buddy movie made so famous by movies like “Lethal Weapon” and “Rush Hour.” All I can say is, it is about time!

Two words come to mind when I think about Hot Fuzz : Fucking funny. The plot is as simple as it can get which just adds to the humor. Due to jealousy at the London police force (400% arrest record over all others on the force), Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is exiled to the country town of Sandford where there is no real crime to speak of. Angel is befriended by a dumber than dirt constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), a guy who thinks police work is all gun fights and car chases. Within the first week or so of his new assignment, highly suspicious accidents begin to occur and Angel suddenly finds himself mired in a ridiculous situation. Ridiculous because he is surrounded by the Keystone Cops and a zany town folk led by the Neighborhood Watch Alliance or NWA for short (not Niggers With Attitude).

Aside from the silly plot, the next best aspect of the film is characters. Nicholas Angel is the human version of “Robocop.” He’s totally about his job and the letter of the law and can’t fathom why everyone around him shuns him like the plague. Butterman is a typical unmotivated fat kid in high school who fell into the job because of his father. His time is spent getting drunk as shit, eating cake and ice cream and living his life through cop movies — mostly “Bad Boys II” and “Point Break.” The town folk are equally absurd in their own ways. People like: Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton), the owner of the local food mart, is suave motherfucker obsessed with death and Tim Messenger (Adam Buxton) a local newspaper reporter who can’t even spell. Each and everyone of these people just add to the hell that Angel (or Angle — as Messenger typed) is in.

Another plus is just like “Shaun of the Dead,” Hot Fuzz does not at any time take itself seriously. The dialogue and one-liners are so cheesy, Kraft wants to learn the secret and patent it. The special effects, most notably the church and the mini town scenes, are pathetically unrealistic. This is obviously done on purpose, which just adds to the charm of the movie. And without a doubt the final face-off is a classic with enough gunfire to rival “The Killer” (who knew the deli counter is bullet proof?).

Anyways, enough with all the fluff. As with all batteries, there is always a negative and Hot Fuzz has one too. I felt the movie was a bit slow going. There are many periods of filler — scenes with small gags and/or funny conversations and observations — between the action. It would be safe to say half of these moments could have been left on the cutting room floor without any harm coming to the movie. And even though the movie is only 120 minutes long, it can at times seem like it’s been on for hours. It wouldn’t have been a problem had the movie been made in the similar vein as “Airplane!,” where the bulk of the comedy is captured within these types of moments.

Conclusion? Anyone who needs a laugh should see Hot Fuzz . The good aspects of the film greatly outweigh the bad. Even though the movie won’t make a bundle at the box office, it manages to successfully jab the Hollywood juggernaut in the eye. It’s times like these that is fun to pretend to be a movie critic – the other times it’s a time consuming chore. Here’s to hoping that Wright and Pegg have another movie under their sleeve.

Tagged: England , investigation , partner , police

I'm an old, miserable fart set in his ways. Some of the things that bring a smile to my face are (in no particular order): Teenage back acne, the rain on my face, long walks on the beach and redneck women named Francis. Oh yeah, I like to watch and criticize movies.

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'Movie Review: Hot Fuzz (2007)' have 2 comments

May 4, 2007 @ 11:00 am Lawrence Marta

I happened upon your site from a google search, and I must say you’ve got some interesting movie reviews, although I think they’d be better if you did them in a podcast format. There is a great WordPress plugin called PodPress. You can find it here .

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December 6, 2007 @ 6:38 pm Gearhead

I was looking forward to seeing this movie. I really likes Shuan of the Dead and saw that this movie had great ratings.

This movie and it’s comedy just didn’t work for me. I don’t think I even giggled once. I’ve never seen a comedy that so many loved that I didn’t like at all. I thought it was absolutely horrible.

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It begins softly, but don’t be fooled. No sooner does London cop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) — so good at arrests that other coppers hate him — accept his transfer to the drowsy village of Sandford than the aging populace its turning into stone-cold, gore-happy freaks. That’s all you should know, except that this shotgun marriage of Monty Python and Apocalypto is a kissing, kick-ass cousin to Shaun of the Dead , the 2004 zombiefest that Pegg co-wrote with director Edgar Wright. You can’t beat these Brits for blood lust and belly laughs. Pegg once again teams up with actor Nick Frost, this time playing Danny Butterman, the chubby Sandford cop whose lovable old dad (Jim Broadbent) is the local police chief.

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It’s the living, not the undead, who are plaguing the quiet village. Angel is a ramrod, but Danny’s knowledge of violence comes exclusively from the Michael Bay Bad Boys flicks he pops into his DVD player.

Bay’s pyrotechnics get royally tweaked as bullets fly and blood splatters. But Wright brings you close to the characters as well as to the action. It makes all the difference, as the dream team of Pegg and Frost — not to mention choice bits from Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy and Timothy Dalton — lace the mayhem with mirth. It’s a blast.

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Hot Fuzz : Movie Review

Author : pam grady.

Hot Fuzz (United Kingdom, 2007)

It has been remarked by more than one critic that the action comedy can be one of the easiest movies to make poorly and one of the most difficult to make effectively. The problem is evident: comedy and action often war with one another, each trying to steal the spotlight at the expense of the other. If there's too much humor or the jokes are too fatuous, the action feels extraneous. And if the film is slanted toward action, the comedy can feel out of place and, if poorly executed, can kill the momentum. The team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the guys who combined guffaws and gore in Shaun of the Dead , have elected to follow their offbeat zombie farce with an action comedy. Considering their earlier success, it is perhaps unsurprising that they have gotten it mostly right. Hot Fuzz is a little too long and suffers from a sagging midsection when the level of exposition becomes laborious, but the spectacularly entertaining final 30 minutes compensates for a lot of flaws.

One key element that Wright and Pegg nail is to develop characters we care about and situations that, while not breathtakingly compelling, are at least interesting. While there have been plenty of exceptions throughout the years ( 48 Hours, True Lies , and so forth…), the generic action comedy cannot boast either quality. Often, action scenes are just flashy ways to pad out things between the jokes and the protagonists are thinly drawn caricatures. Given the backing of someone with money, it's easy enough to make those soulless, by-the-numbers comedies and we see a few every year. Attempting and succeeding at something more ambitious is the mark of an interesting filmmaker. In the end, Hot Fuzz does for the action comedy what Shaun of the Dead did for the horror comedy.

Sergeat Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is the ultimate cop. He's so good that his superiors in London have him transferred to the tiny burb of Sandford because his superlative record is making his co-workers look bad. He arrives in the village and immediately begins applying the letter of the law to every circumstance. Angel's laid-back superior, Inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent), encourages the newcomer to relax and partners him with his bumbling son, Danny (Nick Frost). Danny is enthused but naïve and bombards Angel with questions about his big-city police exploits. Has he ever fired guns in both hands? Has he ever fired a gun while leaping through the air? Has he ever fired a gun while involved in a high speed pursuit? Police work in Sandford is comprised of momentous events like chasing down a missing swan or rebuking a man illegally clipping a neighbor's hedges, but a sudden rash of deaths gives the police something new to investigate. Everyone assumes they're accidents except Angel, who believes they are murders orchestrated by the Machiavellian Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton), who owns the local grocery store and is scheming to increase the scope of his empire.

Hot Fuzz relies so heavily on character and plot development that it takes an overlong 90 minutes before things start getting outrageous. That's not to say the setup is without merit, but the humor during these sequences is more restrained than what comes later. There are plenty of subtle jabs, visual gags, and a few high profile cameos (Cate Blanchett, Peter Jackson, Bill Nighy). The wink-wink-nudge-nudge "buddy" relationship between partners Angel and Danny is developed in such a way that it mimics the formula of a romantic liaison without ever straying beyond the platonic. This is part of the parody. These two never whisper sweet nothings or engage in anything that might disturb homophobes, but they fall asleep on the couch next to each other after watching movies on TV and Angel later buys flowers for Danny. The movie has fun toying with this dynamic.

Then, 30 minutes before the film winds down, all hell breaks loose. The filmmakers pull out the stops and satirize every imaginable cliché of the genre, throwing in visual references to dozens of contemporary cop movies. John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, and Clint Eastwood collide in a hail of gunfire as the fuzz go in, guns blazing, to reclaim the grocery store and the town from the nefarious do-badders who have taken possession of it. And just because this is a comedy doesn't mean Wright shies from gore. The impaling of one character is shown in the most graphic manner possible. There are no sacred cows, either. Priests blaspheme and an old woman gets kicked in the face.

Pegg is note-perfect as the tough cop who begins to show signs of humanity before donning the dark glasses and arming himself with more ammo than Rambo. Nick Frost couldn't be better cast as the wimpy sidekick who grows a backbone under Angel's tutelage. Jim Broadbent brings a genial, paternal quality to his role as Inspector Butterman, and there's a great scene in which he snaps into focus and takes charge. Timothy Dalton's villain will remind viewers more of his role in The Rocketeer than his short tour-of-duty as the world's most famous superspy.

Hot Fuzz is the second police satire to arrive in theaters this year and it is vastly superior to Reno 911 . That earlier film is an example of what happens when a movie uses lame material to tie together an uneven string of jokes. Hot Fuzz has a higher agenda, and it shows. This movie wants to tickle the funny bone while telling a story that's worth telling. For the most part, Wright achieves this aim. A slightly trimmed down Hot Fuzz might have provided a more heady brew, but even with a little more fat than is necessary, this one offers enjoyable fare with more than one masterful course.

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"Spoofing Red Shire England"

What You Need To Know:

(HH, PCPC, ABAB, B, Pa, LLL, VVV, S, AA, M) Strong humanist, politically correct worldview attacking conservative village life in England where the comic hero says that he’s agnostic about whether God exists and the local Christian vicar is unmasked as a villain and spouts a blasphemy, plus some moral elements stressing law and order but which are weakened by the movie’s humanist worldview (moralism divorced from God, especially when stressing law and order, can become fascism) and villains belong to a secret cult of community worshippers who murder to protect village’s clean status; 36 obscenities (about half or more are “f” words), one strong profanity, one strong profanity that’s a blasphemy, and five light profanities; lots of action violence, some comic violence and some extreme, gruesome violence such as decapitations, large stone gruesomely smashes man’s head, explosions, gunfights, pratfalls, images of murdered bodies and two heads without bodies, and woman stabbed with garden shears; no sex scenes but an adulterous affair is part of the plot and female police officer says she’s been “around the station” a few times; no nudity; alcohol use and drunkenness; no smoking; and, secret conservative cult deviously manipulates village and its status and police officials transfer officer who makes them look too bad because he’s so good.

More Detail:

HOT FUZZ is an action-packed English comedy that is very funny until its R-rated content kicks in about halfway through the narrative.

Nicholas Angel is such a good cop that he makes all the other cops in London look really bad. So, his superiors transfer him to the safest village in England, the sleepy, rustic town of Sandford.

Once there, Angel is partnered with Danny Butterman, the chubby son of the police chief, who has a passion for Hollywood cop movies. Danny longs to experience the gunfights and car chases he sees in those movies. Angel is quick to dismiss Danny’s childish fantasies, but, when a series of grisly accidents rocks the village, Angel becomes convinced that there’s a dangerous mass murderer on the loose. Danny’s dreams of high-octane police action soon become a reality.

The first half or so of HOT FUZZ is a hilarious, genial spoof of police thrillers and village life in England. Then, however, the movie’s R-rated gruesome violence and strong foul language kick into gear. The story also descends into a politically correct attack on conservative tradition in English villages. Even the local Christian vicar is unmasked as a villain who spouts a blasphemy at one point. Here, it should be pointed out that the comic hero proclaims in the middle of the story that he’s agnostic about whether God exists or not. This gives the movie a strong humanist worldview. All of the negative content eventually becomes too excessive, unpalatable and silly.

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Gory but comic film for mature kids and teens, action-packed buddy comedy has swearing and gore., lot of fuzz over nothing., totally inappropriate, amazing film. one of my favourites, great movie to violent for younger kids, d*mn good movie..

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"Fuzz," which is one of the nicest cops ‘n’ crooks movies in a long time, isn’t at all the kind of movie I expected. I was put off by the ad, I guess. When you get all kinds of cartoon characters bursting out of the page at you with guns blazing and skirts flying in the wind, somehow you instinctively know that the movie they’re in will be cheerless and dumb.

Ads like that try too hard. All that was missing from the "Fuzz" ad was an exploding helicopter in the background. To make up for it, however, there was a caricature of Burt Reynolds in the foreground, stretched on his side in the most famous pose since Venus emerged from the sea.

So I went expecting the worst, and in under 15 minutes I found myself won over by "Fuzz." It’s an offbeat, funny, quietly cheerful movie in which Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct is finally brought to life. Several movies have been based on McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, but never one in which the squad room was explored so lovingly by the camera, and the detectives were made so human. Maybe moving the 87th Precinct to Boston helped.

There are several plots, which all take place at the same time, and that is all right because things are always happening simultaneously in a police station. Let’s see. A gang of mad bombers led by the Deaf Man ( Yul Brynner ) is blowing up city officials as part of an extortion plot. A rapist is loose in the park. Some punk kids are setting drunken bums on fire. There are various murders, homicides, fratricides, and complaints that someone is dumping garbage into the front seats of cars. Also, the squad room is being painted apple green by two wisecracking jerks from the Department of Maintenance.

This maelstrom is presided over by three detectives who are laconic, eager, and slightly incompetent. They’re played by Burt Reynolds, Jack Weston and Tom Skeritt , in a sustained piece of ensemble acting that is really fine. Everybody steps on everybody else’s lines all the time, and director Richard A. Colla creates a nice sense of everything happening at once, something like Robert Altman did in " M*A*S*H ." When policewoman Raquel Welch is called in as a decoy for the rapist, the old precinct really begins to look up.

The movie is funny partly because everything is done deadpan. When there’s a stakeout for the Mad Bomb Squad, for example. Reynolds and Weston sit down on park benches disguised as nuns, and Skeritt and Raquel pose as a loving couple in a double sleeping bag. But then the guy starts to run and Raquel can’t unzip her bag. Everyone is very serious during, this scene, which makes it hilarious.

The conclusion looks at first sight like an unbelievable coincidence. While Weston and Reynolds stake out a liquor store that’s going to be held up, the Mad Bomber comes in with his bodyguard to order a case of champagne. The Bombers and the crooks shoot it out with each other while the cops hide under the counter. A lucky break? "Not at all," says Weston. "Skillful police work."

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Fuzz (1972)

Yul Brynner as The deaf man

Burt Reynolds as Detectives

Raquel Welch as Policewoman

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Funko Pop's co-op shooter lets you blast the heads off dead-eyed dolls from Hot Fuzz, Battlestar Galactica and more this September

From former TT Games devs behind the Lego games

Your feelings on Funko Pop probably fall into one of two categories: you either hate the black-eyed, copy-paste figures modelled on pop-culture characters with a burning passion, or you own enough of them to construct a small fortress and defend your newfounded Funko nation from the government. Either way, it looks like the first video game starring the ubiquitous toy collectables might somehow scratch your itch.

Funko Fusion stays true to the kitchen-sink approach of Funko Pop to gathering every recognisable (and often niche) movie, video game, TV show and somewhat celebrity from the last 40 years and slamming them together. The list of 60-plus playable characters in the game spans over 20 different universes - from classic movies like The Thing, Chucky and Jaws, through eighties nostalgia of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Back to the Future, though to 21st century additions from Battlestar Galactica, Netflix series The Umbrella Academy, Edgar Wright movies Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead (plus Scott Pilgrim), recent horror gems in Jordan Peele’s Nope and dancing-murder-doll flick Megan, comic books-turned-TV series Invincible and The Walking Dead, and Jurassic World (not Park). Phew.

So far, so Funko Pop - it’s not like the line of figures has any original characters of its own to mine for rich inspiration here. What surprised me more is how violent the upcoming co-op shooter looks to be, with the trailer showing the dead-eyed dolls torching a Thing monster with flamethrowers, being dismembered (though I’m fairly certain that blood splattered everywhere is ketchup), eaten by The Mummy’s scarab beetles, chomped by Bruce the Jaws Shark, and literally having their balloon-headed brains blasted out of them in third-person shooting sections.

And honestly, while I hate to admit it, it looks… quite fun? While this is the debut release from developers 10:10 Games, they recently have the pedigree to back it up, having formed from alumni out of TT Games, including studio founder Jon Burton. Arguably you’d be hard-pressed to find a better fit for a cheeky-yet-totally solid take on a bunch of pop-culture franchises, going by the very enjoyable Lego games. I’m personally down to romp around in the frozen Antarctica of The Thing for the first time since its own underrated video game 20-plus years ago - if being a bobble-headed Kurt Russell is the price to pay, so be it.

Funko Fusion will be out on Steam this September 13th. If you’re especially keen on The Walking Dead’s Rick and Michonne, pre-ordering before then will get you both characters and some costumes in a free pack.

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