Comedy Is Hot Stuff
Illawarra Mercury
Thursday March 22, 2007
HOT FUZZ (MA)
Stars: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton Director: Edgar Wright* * * *Screening: Greater Union Shellharbour, Hoyts Warrawong Here's a laugh riot decked out in full battle armour: it's The Bill meets The Vicar of Dibley meets Bad Boys, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard.If you're a fan of trashy buddy cop action movies, you'll seriously dig this elaborate and affectionate riff on the conventions of the genre.It's a sly parody so pumped up with gunplay, screeching car chases and torrents of blood that its one-liners work like a sucker punch and pack a hefty wallop.Written and directed by the blokes who did the side-splitting 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (writer-director Wright and co-writer and star Pegg), Hot Fuzz follows PC Nicholas Angel, London's finest cop, as he uncovers an elaborate criminal conspiracy in a sleepy Gloucestershire village.A humourless, by-the-book crime-fighting hero, Angel (Pegg) is banished to quaint little Sandford because his arrest rates make his colleagues look bad.The village's dozy cake-munching police inspector, Frank Butterman (Broadbent), partners Angel with his numbskull son, Danny (Frost), an oafish rookie bobby instantly smitten with Angel's action-man credentials. Danny's a die-hard fan of action movies and the Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze film Point Break is a favourite, which sets the scene for some neat running gags.Angel is clearly not cut out for rescuing swans and drawing the raffle at the church fete but none of the dopes at the Sandford nick believe the hot shot when he suspects a murder conspiracy behind a series of grisly accidents claiming the lives of village folk.Convinced that the sinister supermarket owner (Dalton, in a marvellously menacing, moustache-twirling pantomime turn) is responsible, Angel and his slowpoke sidekick Danny crack the case wide open, setting the scene for an all-guns-blazing showdown in the cobblestone town square.The story moves at a furious pace, with plot machinations niftily telescoped at regular intervals into machine-gun edits.While the effortless chemistry between Pegg and Frost (honed in Shaun of the Dead) is irresistibly low-key, the stunts and shoot-outs offer a high-octane buzz, with punchlines punctuating the testosterone with pinpoint precision.Shaun fans will relish the grisly excesses. One death in particular is spectacularly, hilariously gory.With cameos by Edward Woodward, The Office's Martin Freeman, Love Actually's Bill Nighy, Tristram Shandy's Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais' Extras co-star and co-writer Stephen Merchant, Hot Fuzz is bigger, faster, louder and more expensive-looking than Shaun of the Dead.That doesn't necessarily make it better, but it's still by far the most MA-rated fun you'll have at the movies right now. JAMES JOYCE
© 2007 Illawarra Mercury
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