Hot Fuzz, like Shaun of the Dead before it, is a pretty clever piece of filmmaking. Edgar Wright knows his source material – zombies in Shaun, action movies here – and his cast, particularly Simon Pegg, is on the same page. Unfortunately, the execution continues to be sloppy, and the ideas have long run out by the time the film finishes its (rather excessive) two-hour running time.
There are really three films in Hot Fuzz: The first, and the one you’ve probably seen the most of in the trailers, involves hotshot London constable Nick Angel being transferred to the peaceful village of Sandford as a consequence of making everyone else on the force look bad. It’s a standard “Big City Cop in the Small Town”, and it’s the fairly safe sort of comedy one used to be able to watch on PBS on Saturday nights. It’s funny enough, though: Bill Nighy breezes through as Angel’s old boss, and Jim Broadbent gets a slightly meatier role as Sandford’s top policeman. Angel has to retrieve missing swans, allay the neighbourhood watch association’s fears about the encroachment of jugglers and living statues, and confiscate the arsenal of a farmer who’s been hoarding firearms since WWII. It’s not cutting edge material, but it’s funny enough. There’s also a great uncredited (and nearly unidentifiable, except in closeup) by Cate Blanchett.
It’s the middle third of Hot Fuzz that will have you looking at your watch. Nick’s partner, the rather lacklustre yet nepotistically gifted Danny, tries to befriend the Serious Big City Cop by introducing him to the local pub and the oeuvre of Michael Bay. It’s an attempt at character development with characters that are only slightly deeper than a Mr. Turtle pool; Hot Fuzz is mostly fluff – intentionally and generally enjoyably so – and errs greatly when it tries to delve into more serious material. It similarly takes another wrong turn in trying to spin a mystery, as Angel investigates a series of gruesome murders he’s convinced are connected. There’s depressingly little comedy in this section, though the murders offer some brief black comedy. And while the ultimate plot is revealed to be quite absurd, it’s delivery is so serious that there are no laughs to be had. It’s here that the greatest flaw of Hot Fuzz is most obvious: It’s too silly to be taken seriously, but doesn’t provide nearly enough humour to be a successful comedy.
Things pick up in the third act as the film jumps into full-on Super Action Cop Movie parody. After failing to clean up Sandford by following the rules and playing it safe, Angel takes care of business the only way a Real Man knows how: He grabs a bunch of guns and shoots things up. If Wright has missed an action movie cliché, it’s probably a pretty obscure one: There’s plenty of leaping through the air while firing two pistols, fisticuffs with big dumb brutes, splattering blood (and tomato sauce), and car chases.
But unfortunately, Wright seems to have left out much of the humour and leaned more towards an homage: After a promising opening in which Angel delivers a flying kick to the face of an old woman (er… yes, but it’s funny when you see it), Wright trots out the same gag for the next ten minutes or so. Yes, he’s exchanging automatic weapons fire with a bunch of mild-mannered and middle-aged villagers. We get it. Can we move on to something else? While earlier sequences hint at Wright’s gift for glorious excess, there’s not nearly enough on display as the film builds towards its climax: It’s all kind of stupid, but falls short of actually being funny. The modern action movie is ridiculous all on its own, and requires something more than simple imitation to make a successful satire. One wonders if Wright isn’t too in love with the source material: He’s so busy blowing shit up that he’s lost sight of the fact that other directors have been blowing shit up in far more interesting ways for several decades. The one thing Wright could bring to the mix – his sense of humour and gruesome excess – is sadly missing.
There is an old bit of dramatic advice that says if there’s a gun on the mantle in the first act, someone had better get shot with it by the third act. Hot Fuzz takes this a tad too far: Not only is there a gun on the mantle (metaphorically speaking), but someone picks it up, waves it around, and loudly proclaims that they are going to shoot someone with it at precisely 3:42 next Tuesday afternoon. When the setup is that blunt, one would hope for a punchline that involves a bit more complexity, but alas: It would be difficult to telegraph the jokes any further without handing out script pages to the audience. Are all those mentions of a scene in Point Blank going to relate to the story in some way? Is that conspicuous placement of a notebook in a breast pocket completely superfluous to the plot? What do you suppose is going to happen after the director is finished cutting back and forth between shots of a woman on a bicycle and a man sitting in a parked car? To some, these may be unfathomable questions; to those who have, you know, read a book or watched a movie, they can probably be fathomed a little bit.
Hot Fuzz has a pretty funny trailer. There are even a few funny moments that don’t appear in the preview, and the shoot-em-up climax offers a decent spot of entertainment. But the middle third sucks the life out of the film, and two hours is entirely too long for this sort of parody. Some more judicious editing at the script stage might have helped keep it afloat, but even at 90 minutes I suspect the film would feel like a 15-minute sketch that somehow mutated out of control. Hot Fuzz falls far short of the satire mark set by the likes of Blazing Saddles and Airplane, and it’s equally unimpressive when set against all but the most mediocre action movie. Save for a few bright moments, it combines the worst attributes of bad action movies and bad comedies. And dear god, we’ve really got enough of those already.