REVIEW: Hot Fuzz

Ahh, British humor. You never cease to amaze me. From Monty Python to Mr. Bean to The Office, there is rarely a British comedy that fails hit its mark with me (unlike American humor). The latest export from across the pond is the cop comedy Hot Fuzz, created by the team responsible for Shaun of the Dead. Does it hold up?

  Hot Fuzz shows us Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), arguably the best policeman in the London Police Force. So what do they do? They send him to the country, where crime is the lowest in the entire country. The fast-paced Angel takes a while to settle into his new surroundings, and his new shadow Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), but as strange occurrences start to pop up around the village, the die-hard (get it?) cop in Angel springs into action to get to the bottom of the plot.

  If you’ve ever seen Shaun of the Dead, this film will be more of the same, just with different subject matter. Same style of humor, same style of visuals, same style of editing. I’ll get into each of them individually, but I’ll put up the disclaimer that if you hated Shaun of the Dead, you probably won’t like Hot Fuzz, and that’s the best barometer I can give.

  The humor in Hot Fuzz is spot on, mixing wordy British humor and Laurel-and-Hardy-style gags. Pegg is a brilliant straight-man, with a look about him like a caged animal that is aware of the bars, but lacks the strength to fight back anymore. And every deck needs a joker, and Frost plays a perfect foil to the straight-as-an-arrow Pegg. Butterman is a man-child, living in a fantasy world since his job doesn’t really require his attention. The humor is very dry here, feeding off of a lack of emotion than over the top gags and slapstick, and a lot of the jokes will garner medium-sized laughs from the American audience, with a few jokes soaring above the rest.

  This is going to sound like a negative, but the film feels like it was edited by a crack head. By that I mean that the style of the film means that a lot of the shots are a second or less in length. (If you have epilepsy, you may not want to watch this film) It didn’t bother me on the whole, but there were times when I though that the film would throw me off like a 90 pound rodeo rider. It’s very similar to Shaun of the Dead, except chopped up even further, with the crash cuts hitting you like little pebbles one after the other.

  The story is okay, reminding me a lot of The Stepford Wives as I got further into it. It amazed me how the film straddled the line between balls-out action and quirky humor. Edgar Wright knows how to direct action, and the resulting film is a lot of fun, despite being a little hectic.

Final Judgment: 4 guns fired whilst leaping through the air out of 5