The irony is that he is the unwitting prisoner of quite another kind of crime genre: without knowing it, poor Danny is living inside an English Gothic celluloid nightmare like Straw Dogs or The Wicker Man. He has a vast DVD library of these films, and passionately yearns for the muscular simplicity of American cops with their lock'n'load approach to taking down the bad guys. Does this community share a creepy little secret that Sgt Angel doesn't yet realise?ĭanny and Nicholas, as their friendship deepens, share a woman-free relationship that is tragically homoerotic in the tradition of movies that Danny loves, such as Point Break and Bad Boys II (exquisitely, it is the distinctively crasser sequel that Danny specifies). Everyone is preoccupied with the Best Kept Village competition to the point of manic obsession: we are crucially to learn that failure one year caused one local woman to become so depressed she "drove her Datsun Cherry into a ravine".
The coppers themselves are cheerfully useless and law enforcement is entirely sub-contracted to the Neighbourhood Watch Association, a group repeatedly referred to by its very unfortunate initials. He wants to know if Angel has ever fired a gun while jumping sideways through the air, or if it's true that if you shoot at a special spot in the brain it will make the head spectacularly explode.Īlmost everyone in this manicured little community seems to know and love each other, from the sinister supermarket mogul (Timothy Dalton), to the epicene solicitor (David Threlfall), to the local Inspector Butterman, poor Danny's dad, played by Jim Broadbent.
#HOT FUZZ PC#
Here the urban tough guy finds himself all adrift among the country mice, particularly his new partner, PC Danny Butterman, a fantastically overweight and lenient bobby played by Nick Frost, who is saucer-eyed with excitement about the macho world of London law-enforcement. Pegg plays Sgt Nicholas Angel, a fiercely motivated and successful London copper who finds himself transferred to the sleepy Gloucestershire town of Sandford. Some may feel that there was more mileage and dramatic ingenuity in zombies, but for me the Wright/Pegg/Frost team make up for this with plenty of irrepressible fun, an interestingly sophisticated sense of the fictional differences between British and American crime - and big, regular laughs.
#HOT FUZZ MOVIE#
Hot Fuzz tackles a new movie genre - actually, and crucially, two movie genres - and mixes in plenty of gags. Their stock-price has shot up since then and this new film, disconcertingly, seems to have a top telly star in almost every minor role.
Between them, director Edgar Wright and co-authors and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost cheered us all up after a depressing welter of mockney-gangsters and persuaded us, as it were, to remove our collective big toe from the shotgun-trigger.
#HOT FUZZ TV#
The Britfilm bonanza in its current form arguably stems from the optimism sparked in 2004 by Shaun of the Dead, the zombie spoof from the creators of the cult TV show Spaced. At the London Critics' awards last week, I made an earnest speech about this success and for a heady few seconds bodysurfed on a wave of feelgood whooping from the audience, before I ruined it all with a spectacularly misjudged witticism about Dirty Sanchez: The Movie not winning anything - a joke received in the same kind of sudden, clock-ticking quiet that parties of grand ladies and gentlemen in 1901 must have greeted the announcement of Queen Victoria's death.
There's such euphoria surrounding our film industry right now that I'd be tempted to compare it with the heady days of Britpop, were it not for the chill of imminent catastrophe and shame that this word conjures up.
0 kommentar(er)
