Village Green Devastation Society

[April 18th, 2007] The key to any action movie worth its bullets lies in selecting a sufficiently hateful villain. Edgar Wright made his debut with flesh-craving zombies in Shaun of the Dead, but for his new feature Hot Fuzz, the director has moved on to something truly heinous: community-improvement leagues. Vampires may drain blood and terrorists may bomb buses, but neither is likely to mail you stern notices about the condition of your lawn.

The Neighborhood Watch Association of Sandford, a hamlet in upcountry England, proves particularly niggling and vindictive, but at first it seems a poor match for Sergeant Nicolas Angel, the newest addition to the village's police force. Angel is the poster boy of the London police, until his superiors decide they want him off the poster. "You're making the rest of us look bad," his commanding officer admits—and so off Angel flies to Sandford, where he immediately begins arresting underage pub rats and potential drunken drivers. The great joke that sets up Hot Fuzz—and it wears surprisingly well—is not just that Angel is a poor fit for his new home, but that the character is an unlikely choice for the actor embodying him. Simon Pegg (last seen as Shaun—yes, of the dead) is an exceptionally unimposing physical presence: rail-thin, short and wide-eyed. But he plays Angel with complete humorlessness, and the droll joke of his self-regard recalls nothing so much as David Caruso's ill-advised movie career. Except this joke is intentional.

Wright has a keen eye for absurdities, and it's not long before Angel and his squad pal Danny Butterman (Nick Frost, the portly Shaun sidekick) are indulging that taste with a drunken marathon of the most risible cop flicks. (Upon finishing Point Break, Angel grants the movie its merits but holds strong that the shootouts "would require a considerable amount of paperwork.") In its last 30 minutes, Hot Fuzz—which drags a bit during its rural criminal-conspiracy narrative—explodes into a skylarking farce, sending up every street-battle cliché ever perpetrated by Michael Bay in Bad Boys II.

All of which raises questions of irony. Our hero is only on the side of the angels because his opponents are revealed as more doctrinaire than he is—and because, under the bizarre circumstances, even a law-loving cop is required to shoot his guns a whole lot. He takes aim at the purists who would kill to preserve order—just as Wright sets his sights on the ponderous formulas of big-budget extravaganzas. Contrast this with the deferential homage of the other blow-'em-up movie currently in wide release: Grindhouse, which holds tight loyalty to the inanities of its source material. (Wright directed a segment of the Tarantino/Rodriguez picture, but handled his bit with a characteristically light touch.) Grindhouse is an A-budget picture servile to B-budget pictures; Hot Fuzz is a B-picture that mocks A-pictures. Guess which one is better. It's simple: Servile movies are bad movies. And, to his credit, Edgar Wright has no respect for his elders.