Hot Fuzz review

Yes it's an old film now, but I'd read the Simon Pegg interview in the Radio Times regarding "Burke and Hare" and thought "I fancy watching Hot Fuzz" so I did.

It 'd be easy to categorise this (and Shaun of the Dead) as a spoof; that'd be wrong. The spoof seems to take the clichés of its target and exaggerates them to absurd proportions to make them funny. This takes the clichés of action films and plants them in the soil of reality which makes them funny. It's not a spoof, it's a tribute.


The story - Nick Angel supercop is promoted out of London to a perfect crime-free country village where the most urgent call on police time is about an escaped swan. However are things as simple and crime-free as they appear?

It's difficult to go any further without getting into spoilers, so I won't. It's got a good cast list including such luminaries as Edward Woodward and Timothy Dalton who is awesome. No seriously, he takes the part and attacks it with malicious joy; he does not appear in a single scene that won't make you want to applaud. That's not to downplay the others who nail their parts.

All this is helped by the script, the direction, and all the incidentals that normally mean nothing but here are all woven into the storyline. Check out Bill Bailey and the Iain Banks novel; or is it an Iain M Banks novel?

The clichés come out to play at the end with some getting subverted in various ways and it's all just fun to match what's going on to incidents from earlier on. It's just a tightly produced film  If you haven't already seen it just go and rent it now.

I'll leave you with the image of Dalton pulling up to a burned-out crime scene in his convertible with "The Crazy World of Arthur Brown" playing on the stereo. Perfect!