Danny, Bring the Noise!
by Titus Gee
Having conquered the lands of the undead with their debut feature Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and their cohort of talent have turned their sights on the genre of police action/buddy movies.
Hot Fuzz (directed by Wright) borrows a trick from Shaun by taking a bombastic American genre into the scaled-down context of work-a-day Britain. Fuzz follows the exploits of over-achieving police sergeant Nicholas Angel (Pegg) and his loafy new partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), as they battle – at times quite literally – the faux perfection of the country’s “safest” village, a dully cobbled place called Sandford. The conspiracy they uncover is neither what Angel expects, nor what he initially suspects.
It might sound commonplace, but this filmmaking crew has a seemingly alchemical knack for redeeming genre pulp. They have now created two great movies that cleverly obey genre rules, while managing never to be generic. The trick seems to be taking everything seriously except for the formula.
The writers, Pegg and Wright, replaced the tired short-hand that pushes most genre plots from titles through to the fade out, with infusions of character and story, while lovingly including and, riffing upon, all the time-worn clichés. A tiny smirk of self-awareness artfully spins corniness into comedy in scene after scene.
Wright has said that Shaun of the Dead is “not a spoof of zombie movies, but rather a zombie movie that is also a comedy movie.” And yet it is more than that. It is a story about love and friendship and the stultified culture of suburban London.
In turn, Fuzz turns its shotgun crosshairs on the hypocrisy of local politics. The skewering it administers would play as well in the HOA-ruled suburbs of Los Angeles as it does in rural Britain. For character development, it leaves romance out almost entirely, at least in the traditional sense, and zeroes in on the heterosexual buddy love between Angel and Butterman.
Pegg and Frost collaborate with obvious affection built on friendship that predates their film success by many years. They manage to play up the comedy awkwardness of guys expressing their feelings for each other, without giving into knee-jerk gags that snicker about homosex. With Wright as the third spoke of their triumvirate of fun, they seem to have had a jolly romp making this movie, and that energy spills off the screen into the theater audience.
At the same time, the filmmakers refuse to cut corners, and every element of their work is technically excellent. The team does not waste a single shot or edit and Wright never throws away a scene for the sake of a derivative gag. He uses some signature techniques from Shaun – such as the fast-cut close-up on a mundane action like hanging up a coat – but reworked to completely different effect in a new context.
The result is a tight, polished product that catches up the audience and whisks them away into the story, transcending the forms and fittings of summer-movie schlock that it uses as source material.
Together, Pegg, Wright and Frost have created a unique and original voice – qualities that are all too uncommon in the cinema these days – that connects with a wide range of moviegoers. Already fans are speculating about which genre will fall to their next campaign. For some it doesn’t matter. Whether the boys turn to disaster flicks or frock pictures, we’ll be lining up early for another ride.
