Hot Fuzz

by J.D. Cook

If you don’t know Hot Fuzz is about top cop Sergeant Nicholas Angel (played by Simon Pegg) being forcibly moved to a tiny town because he was making the other London cops look bad via his awesome record and skills. There he meets up with local cop Danny Butterman (played by Nick Frost) who teaches him how to switch off from being a cop and relax. Soon after they discover a shocking conspiracy at the heart of the town and must meet it with an all-out gun battle. Now I’m going to be honest when I first sat through Hot Fuzz I didn’t quite get it. I didn’t grow up a big fan of buddy cop films so my frame of reference wasn’t quite where it needed to be to love the film. I did think the dialogue was hysterical, the plot was brilliant and I loved all the great actors who popped up in the film, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, Cate Blanchett, Steve Coogan, and Peter Jackson the list goes on. Unfortunately I only got it on a very superficial level but I still couldn’t help re-watching it because I knew there was some key to the film that was eluding me. Well every viewing I seemed to like the film a little more because I caught a new joke or got something I missed the first time. One of these viewings even inspired me to write a novel based partially on the film, partially on two songs that play in the film written by the Kinks and taken from their album the Village Green Preservation Society and partially from my experiences with a local cult of star worshipers who had to be dealt with. Alright the last part was not entirely true but the rest was! Anyway I finally GOT Hot Fuzz when I viewed it in a theater for the first time as part of a double feature with the World’s End. This film is to the buddy cop genre what Shaun of the Dead was to the zombie genre. I mean I got that it was a sort of buddy cop homage before seeing it in a theater but something about the camera angles really just worked so much better on the big screen. There is this one great shot of Pegg and Frost that circles them that seems straight out of Bad Boys II and it is hysterical on the big screen! There was also something amazing about viewing Hot Fuzz with a huge audience of Edgar Wright, Pegg and Frost fans. I’d liken it to the thrill people get when viewing the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Halloween in costume. Oh and the scene where Pegg dropkicks the old lady is a classic moment of cinema history. Anyway once again I can only say you should invest in watching the second part of the 3 flavors Cornetto Trilogy as soon as possible… it’s off the fucking chain!!!