Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

Life In the Country

I was up fairly early for a Saturday -- a sunny, pleasant Saturday -- but hours slow in getting moving on more than some email and laundry. Still, Nick and I finally did get out to catch the first showing of the day of Hot Fuzz at a local Regal.

Being a Yank I know Simon Pegg and Nick Frost almost entirely from one of my favorite movies of the past several years, Shaun of the Dead. Oh, I've seen them pop up individually in various tv shows and movies, but when I think of them together it's in Shaun... and now that's expanded to Hot Fuzz. Unlike Shaun, where they play friends since childhood, in Fuzz - as one would expect of what is in part a British parody of U.S. cop/buddy films - they start out as strangers.

Now, I don't want to emphasize the parody angle, because Hot Fuzz is too smart for that, telling its own story in its own way and avoiding most of the clichéd abrasiveness and conflict that would be so predictably inevitable in a Hollywood production. Instead, both characters are amiable and likable from the start.

Pegg plays hyper-achieving, by the book, highly-decorated, London police sergeant Nicholas Angel. Angel's identity is so wrapped up in his job that he's already lost the girl before we really meet him, and ultimately realizes that he isn't sure he's capable of switching it off.

Frost plays patrolman Danny Butterman in a picturesque, bucolic village with the lowest crime rate in all of the U.K., who's really only a police officer because his father is the local chief and it was something he fell into. In part because his duties are so light and likely because he's trying to glamorize the job in his own mind, he's collected and watched an enormous library of U.S. cop and action movies. When Angel's reassigned to the placid hamlet Butterman's as close to those action stars as he's ever gotten and becomes Angel's doe-eyed protégé.

I don't want to lay out the whole movie. As you would suspect, part of the movie derives from having someone used to running in fifth gear being dropped into first, and much of the rest is from how things are not as they first seem in the quiet, award-winning village of Sandford.

Did I enjoy Fuzz as much as I did Shaun? Well... no. In part that's because the earlier film had that zombie angle that attracts some of us like, well, flies -- or perhaps maggots if one's particularly brutal in the analogy. Aside from that, though, in Shaun the characters are flawed and human from the start, and we're watching the rise of the eponymous character against the tumult of a near-apocalypse. In Fuzz we're presented with a character who is something of a paragon, leaving it to much of the movie to humanize him as he comes to develop a personality beyond that of a police officer. In both instances, though, we're seeing someone finding a better place in the world, and in both instances the parts are both written and performed well.

At just a hair past 2 hours I did find my mind starting to wander a shade during the increasingly frenetic final forty minutes or so when it gave way to formula, however much necessary, but the movie didn't drag.

Is this a must-see film for viewing on the big screen? No. It was an enjoyable time, though, and as we plunge towards summer and items such as Spider-Man 3 and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Hot Fuzz is a nice contrast.