![]() ![]() The only friend that Pegg has on the Sandford PD is Nick Frost, the somewhat oafish son of Broadbent whom Pegg is assigned as a partner. It looks like he is not going to be a good fit for this quiet town. He makes four collars for minor offenses even before he officially is on the job there. In fact Pegg looks like he's going to die of sheer boredom. In the United Kingdom it's the most crime free zone in the whole country. It's decided that the place to go to cool that zeal off a bit is the quiet and peaceful rural town of Sandford. Simon Pegg is a too good to be true London police officer who is wracking up arrests and making his colleagues look shameful. Lucky indeed that the CBC is part of my cable package. This film did not get too much play in the USA and I count myself fortunate that I'm close enough to the Canadian border to get these occasional gems broadcast from the CBC. ![]() I've rarely seen a comedy so cleverly written, beautifully directed, atmospheric, or intelligently ridiculous. He's very funny and one of the film's great highlights. Not only is it a reappearance from the abyss he's been lost in since his two-year stint as James Bond, but also a vindication against all who've continually dismissed his credibility as an actor and doubted his comic ability. The film's great surprise is a comeback performance from Timothy Dalton. Nick Frost is a great second banana because not only is he the punchline to Pegg's straight line, he's also funny in such a direct, adolescent way, an unlikely comic relief sidekick. His character is so well-developed as a man of invincible and authentic confidence and incredible drive, a workaholic, a zealot, and also an action hero stereotype. Simon Pegg's performance is a work of comic genius. This works so well not only as a dead-on impression of Hollywood film-making but also as a hilarious opposition to the English countryside. The soundtrack is that of any super-cool action film from Hollywood. It's filled with jump cuts accompanied by loud and constantly changing sound effects, occasional strobe, and montages of grainy, bleached out, extravagantly lit shots edited together at machine gun speed. ![]() The cinematography and editing is a product of the school of Tony Scott and Guy Ritchie. The film-making style in and of itself is complicit in the satire. ![]() Perhaps the most brilliant element of Hot Fuzz is the intertwining of a big-budget action film with gimmicks and a desperately fast pace and a quaint, atmospheric English village given the secrets-of-its-own flavor and a Agatha Christie-style expository structure. It delves very deeply into the conscious social mannerisms of the English, and parodies the timid insular English village life. In some ways, the film is very important for Americans to see. The irony in this film is that it takes place in the serenely beautiful English countryside. The film is brilliantly in precise tune with the American mainstream action adventure. They know the smaller details of Hollywood's formula, as they exemplify with its continuous references to the scene in Point Break where Keanu Reeves fires his gun into the sky in anger and the scene in Bad Boys II where Martin Lawrence, in a circling tracking shot, says, "S*** just got real." Not only do they tackle those less clear characteristics of Hollywood, they also perfectly portray people who talk about awesome scenes in action movies, hilariously by Nick Frost. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg don't simply spoof the plot threads and the car chases. Hot Fuzz satirizes American action films in a way that an American satire would not. ![]()
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