Movie Log: Hot Fuzz

The Wife surprised me by wanting to watch this -- I'd tried to get her to see Shaun of the Dead last year, but she wasn't interested. I guess cops are more mainstream than zombies?

Anyway, we both really liked Hot Fuzz. My only real complaint is that the DVD didn't support subtitles, and we could have used them, given some of the accents. (Also given that we had to keep running the volume down for music montages and up for dialogue scenes, and that we had children trying to get to sleep above our heads.)

The relationship between the characters played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is even more homoerotic than it was in Shaun of the Dead, possibly because (IMBD tells me) the character of a girlfriend for Pegg was eliminated during the script-writing, and her lines mostly given to Frost. But making it that blatant is actually a brilliant move, since these buddy cop movies are all about two guys bonding, pseudo-sexually, over gunfire and explosions.

Oh, right, the plot. If you don't already know, Pegg plays a ridiculously driven cop from London who is bumped up to Sergeant and sent off to a quaint village because he's making the rest of the metropolitan force look bad. The village, and its police force, are a very obvious (and very funny) collection of cliches...up until we discover a slightly different set of secret cliches underlying the whole set-up, just in time for the big ending. Frost is his new partner, the son of the local chief of police, who thinks or wishes that police work was all explosions and diving to the side while firing two guns.

It has exactly the sort of ending you'd expect, given the box cover (and given Frost's character's fascination with Point Break and Bad Boys 2). And that ending is great. The movie leading up to it is a lot of fun, too -- this is easily one of the best comedies I've seen this year. (Though the violence may be too much for some people.) It's the kind of movie with lots and lots of tiny details -- lines of dialogue, background music, shot choice, and so on -- done exactly right, and with lots of good actors in medium-sized roles playing it absolutely straight. I probably missed most of the film references, and I was still laughing out loud every minute or two.