Movie – Hot Fuzz (2007)

This movie was directed by Edgar Wright.  It stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.  Pegg and Wright co-wrote the movie.

All three of these guys loved action movies, especially the “buddy cop” action movies like Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys, Point Break, and others.  They decided to combine their love for these movies and make an action comedy of their own.  The result is both a loving tribute to the genre, as well as a good movie that can stand on its own.

Simon Pegg plays a guy who is pretty much a supercop.  Ever since he joined the police force in London crime has dropped by something like thirty percent.  He’s always bringing in the bad guys, knows every rule and regulation and abides by them, and has little patience with the others on the force that can’t keep up to his high standards.  Of course, this means he has to go.

He’s making the rest of the police force look bad, so his superiors reassign him to a sleepy little village out in the country to get rid of him.  (After he leaves there’s a fun joke where you see a news report that crime has gone up thirty percent in London.)

He gets to the village and finds this goofy guy (Nick Frost) who is just tickled pink to have a real, hero, police officer there to be his partner.  The biggest crime problem this village has is a guy getting drunk now and then, so the only thing Frost’s character knows about fighting “real” crime is what he has seen in buddy cop action movies.  This is a constant source of humor between the two.

As you can imagine, Pegg’s character is not thrilled to be there, but decides to make the best of it.  He goes to the local school to give a talk on being a police officer.  Nick Frost’s character keeps interrupting him during the lecture.  He’s worse than the little kids.  He asks things like, “Have you ever been involved in a high speed pursuit?”  Have you ever fired two guns whilst diving through the air?”  “Is it true there is a place on a man’s head where if you shoot it, his whole head will explode?”

Pegg’s character starts to settle in, but he notices what he considers to be a suspiciously high number of accidents that take place in the village.  He immediately goes into full-on supercop mode again, deciding that there have been a series of killings and cover-ups.  Everybody else thinks he’s just looking for crimes where there are none.  Of course he turns out to be right, so cue as many buddy cop action clichés as can be shown, like the aforementioned diving through the air while firing two guns.  Even the movie poster is an homage/joke on the posters for other movies in the genre.

I highly recommend this movie, especially if you are a fan on the genre.  Even if you are not, I think you will still enjoy this film.  It has a lot of good laughs in it.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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