carbon14 Blog

I don't get to the cinema as often as I would like. I don't want to go on my own and my tastes in film don't often coincide with those of others.

I did get to see Hot Fuzz this week. And I have to say that I was mightily impressed.

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It's stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost will be familiar to many British readers and to anyone who saw Shaun of the Dead. But it's probably a mistake to baldly compare this film to that.

I love Simon Pegg's writing, but it's very difficult to say exactly what it is that he does; you can't easily categorise Hot Fuzz as a comedy, or a spoof or even an homage without grossly underestimating it. This is a comedy, and a good one; no-one was going home with aching sides but the laughs were there and the whole audience loved them. It is a spoof, it plays with its target genres and subverts them deliciously, but it's not a Zucker/Abrahams kind of spoof starring Robert Hays or Leslie Nielsen. In many ways it doesn't get any sillier than many of the action movies it refers to. It is certainly an homage, it's obvious that Pegg truly understands the Action / Cop Buddy Movie.

Probably the only way to do it justice would be to say it's a cross between Midsomer Murders and Bad Boyz II. If can grasp that, I'm sure you can appreciate that you don't actually have to write any jokes to make the whole thing funny.

Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a career cop, married to the job and top of his class. Posted against his will to a quiet country village, he soons uncovers the dark underbelly of the rural idyll.

The supporting cast is a brilliantly eclectic mix, from the likes of Bill Baily and Julia Deakin, familiar faces in Peggs previous work, to the best of british film talent in the likes of Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent and Anne Reid, finished off with a wonderfully creepy turn from Timothy Dalton.

Amazingly, the film manages to send up the cop buddy movie motif, without sending up its characters or itself. The balance is right all the way through, and the action never drags. Be warned though, along with the laughs, the other prominent noises from the audience were on the lines of 'eeeuuggh!' There's not a lot of blood in this film, but what there is is all the more shocking for being a surprise in the quiet country setting.

Go See.

Yarp!