Release Date: 21 June 2007

Synopsis :

Jealous colleagues conspire to get a top London cop (Pegg) transferred to a small town and paired with a witless new partner (Frost). On the beat, the pair stumble upon a series of suspicious accidents and events.

Movie Review:

Just like in the other genre-worship offering in “Death Proof”, there’s a reference versus reverence debate being waged in “Hot Fuzz”. The vantage point for the latter is that it is not being deliberately coy or clandestine about its intentions or its limitations for that matter. It’s because of this aspect that “Hot Fuzz” never elevates higher than a self-referential parody, and never truly deconstructs the genre it lampoons (though it comes damn close to it at extended intervals), which in this case is of the action/crime variety. Not as pointed and neatly demarcated as “Shaun of the Dead” with its directed focus on the walking dead but expansive enough for a lengthy two-hour action comedy that relents more one-liners and subtle cultural jabs than one should be able to process in a single seating.

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg might just be the sharpest minds in Britain but it remains to be seen if parodies are the only comic assaults they have in their feature film arsenal. Comparatively, “Hot Fuzz” lacks a discipline and resonance felt in “Shaun of the Dead”, a stylistic and thematic peer by all accounts. However, their latest spoof has a sophisticated sense of perspicuity that only comes from experience.

A shrewd difference between the two films is that “Hot Fuzz” exists in an universe resembling the audience’s, the one staring back at the screen while “Shaun of the Dead” and indeed, a great deal of its ilk are based in a movie-universe of its own that lacks any sort of self-awareness in its logic. This cinematic consciousness is plainly seen in its diegetic verbal cues of indicating the films that it ends up cribbing from, and brazenly imitating the best and worst of them. A visual cue that is played up for gags is the film’s poster that strongly recalls the self-parody of “Bad Boys II” and is later worked into the narrative as a motivator for one of its characters.

Among Wright’s tried and trusted template are quicksilver edits, narrative bends that cause whiplash and acid satire expertly delivered with a straight face. As succinct a description as possible would be saying that Wright and Pegg approaches their humour with a measure of calculated meta-absurdity, something that permeates the droll, derisiveness of its mostly fish-out-of-water humour and quaint melding of British and American pop culture fetishism.

For what it’s worth, running out of ammo (far from being literal) at the end of a film that starts out so spectacularly funny is not as shameful as it would be in a lesser effort. Its breathless pacing grinds to a halt so suddenly that there’s an immediate and sobering understanding that though the film might have exhausted its repertoire, at the very least you’d have stumbled on the definition of paro-dying.

Movie Rating:

(Spectacularly funny for the first half, but is unable to sustain itself throughout the 2 hours)

Review by Justin Deimen