How ‘Hot Fuzz’ became a movie about movies
Nick Frost (left) and Simon Pegg enforce all laws in 2007’s “Hot Fuzz.” (Universal Studios/MovieStillsDB.com)
Ultimate Movie Year finds the best films from weekends past to build an all-star lineup of cinema.
“Hot Fuzz”
Released April 20, 2007
Directed by Edgar Wright
Where to Watch
I’ve tried to find selections for the Ultimate Movie Year that speak to the diversity of cinema by including genres like action, comedy, and horror. “Hot Fuzz” manages to be a film that combines all those genres and turns them into a parody. Both within the text and subtext, “Hot Fuzz” is an ultimate movie about movies.
“Hot Fuzz” begins with a full-throated introduction of Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), an intensely dedicated police officer in London who has gone above and beyond dedicating his life to law enforcement. That kind of unbridled enthusiasm for law and order is frowned upon by the other officers and supervisors in his department who think Nicholas makes them look bad in comparison. His superiors happily transfer Nicholas to the small rural community of Sandford. In this sleepy but quaint British village, the local police operation only really gets excited when the daily treat is brought into the office. Nicholas strikes up a friendship with fellow officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), who’s the son of the department Inspector (Jim Broadbent) and is thrilled to meet a cop from the big city. While the two bond over discussions of police tactics and action movies, a series of gruesome deaths leads Nicholas to believe there is an underlying darkness to Sandford.
“Hot Fuzz” was the second feature film from British director Edgar Wright, an auteur filmmaker/producer who worked on the cult BBC series, “Spaced,” which also starred Pegg and Frost. After “Spaced” concluded, the trio remained collaborators for many years. They all jumped into feature films together with the 2004 release, “Shaun of the Dead,” a romantic comedy with zombies, which speaks to Wright’s ability to combine and juxtapose several different genres at the same time to become an original voice. Wright also masterfully blends his sense of humor with framing and editing techniques to create a uniquely cinematic comedic style that builds to punch lines through scenes, not dialogue.
Take the introduction to the movie, for instance. The film opens on Nicholas, marching quickly from the background to the foreground to announce himself. Then we enter into a montage that explains his entire police career up until that point. Part of the joke is that Pegg, as an actor, is usually one of the smaller and nebbish characters in his projects, but here he is outclassing every other police constable on the force with ease. Not only do we discover in the montage (set appropriately to the tune of Adam Ant’s “Goody Two Shoes”) that Nicholas is superior in every dangerous situation an officer is put into, he’s also very well respected and popular in the community. Within two minutes, the movie establishes Nicholas as anybody’s ideal … nay, perfect police officer.
Which, in the following scene, is precisely why he needs to go.
As this moment, Wright employs nearly every comedic and cinematic technique at his disposal to craft a perfect sketch scene: characters are quickly established, their desires and conflict are certified to the audience, “today’s the day” of Nicholas’s transfer, the stakes are raised, callbacks are made to earlier jokes, the comedy rule of three is employed (with cameos from some of Britain’s most recognizable funnymen), and a solution is proposed, leading to the climax and final tag to the joke. As sharp as the scripted scene is on paper (along with the talents of the actors involved), notice how Wright also uses framing and editing to tell even more jokes, as each successive administrator slides into view faster than the audience expects. These techniques not only make the scene funnier, but also gives it a dynamic look and feel, right up until Nicholas walks out of the office to face all of his fellow officers, frozen with smiles on their faces, save for the lone Champaign bottle popping. It’s all a master class in film comedy, as Wright immediately establishes the central conflict of the movie: Everyone else finds Nicolas’s extreme competency enduring, but ultimately insufferable.
These sharp scenes quickly move the story to Sandford, and Nicholas meets the many characters that will play essential parts later in the film. Once he arrives in town (a place that’s won “Village of the Year” several years in a row), a series of gruesome deaths dominate his attention but doesn’t seem to interest anybody else. As the mystery unfolds and murder is discovered, “Hot Fuzz” becomes a horror film. Still, because Wright maintains his comedic and cinematic style that was established in the introduction, it’s a graceful transition for audiences.
As the film progresses, Nicholas and Danny become partners, and then friends. As the son of the inspector, Danny is never taken seriously by the other officers. Still, Nicholas engages with him respectfully in an attempt to turn him into a better public servant of the peace. Danny’s thrilled about the arrangement, quizzing Nicholas about police work while introducing him to his favorite action films, including “Bad Boys” and “Point Break.” It’s not only a moment of characterization for Danny, but Wright is also foreshadowing, as the climax of the film transitions “Hot Fuzz” from horror into parodies of the very action films mentioned earlier.
There is a lot of information that is presented in “Hot Fuzz,” with a large cast of characters and a complicated mystery at the heart of the movie, yet it all moves at a brisk pace without losing the audience. This is where Wright’s skills as a director are evident, as characterization and story beats are shown, not told, through the cinematography and editing. We know that the two Sandford detectives are incredibly skeptical of Nicholas not just through their dialogue, but through the visual language of the movie, as Andy Cartwright and Andy Wainright (Rafe Spall and Paddy Considine, respectively) tell Nicholas off at a crime scene and move off-camera. But Cartwright slides back into frame briefly to glare at Nicholas again to emphasize his point.
Later in the movie, Nicholas questions the local grocery store owner Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton), who is clearly self-involved enough that he displays a portrait of himself in his office. By using the full breadth of cinematic techniques, Wright deepens the story beyond the page by reinforcing and elevating vital information. These decisions also make the film funnier and more enjoyable.
What happens when you retweet yourself.
Wright has also found some wonderful collaborators with Pegg and Frost. “Hot Fuzz” is part of Wright’s loose “Cornetto” trilogy of films, which include “Shaun of the Dead” and the later “The World’s End” from 2013, and Pegg and Frost are the leads in all three. They have tremendous comedic chemistry together, but they are also challenging themselves to play new, fully realized characters every time instead of playing the same notes in these movies. “Hot Fuzz” features Pegg in one of his most sober, no-nonsense roles, which contrasts well to the lunacy around him. Meanwhile, Frost is enduring and engaging in his enthusiastic embrace of life’s small pleasures. The combination lays the foundation that makes “Hot Fuzz” excel and remain in our cinematic memories over a decade later.
After a release in the United Kingdom in February 2007, “Hot Fuzz” was released in the states on April 20 to positive reviews and a solid box office run that endured through the early field of summer blockbuster movies over the next few months. But not unlike some of the films Danny loves, “Hot Fuzz” continued to win new fans after its theatrical run with home releases, television airings, and streaming. With Wright, Pegg, and Frost maintaining their quality of work together and in other projects, audiences are going back and finding their previous collaborations as well.
“Hot Fuzz” is an excellent movie on its own, but it also skillfully blends two of our favorite genres that get us to the movie theaters: action and horror. Wright’s creative voice and technical skill as a filmmaker also make “Hot Fuzz” one of the best-made movie comedies in the Ultimate Movie Year. It becomes a great movie that’s also about movies, and reminds us all what we admire about this incredible art form.
The Weekend: As we move through April, historically, we start to see an increase in genuinely strong pictures with some staying power, as opposed to the rare gem that appears through the long winter months.
Going back to the pre-World War II releases, two influential and remarkable movies made their premieres in mid-April. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a 1930 movie that deals with the original World War that concluded just over a decade before the film’s release. “All Quiet” is a Best Picture winner because it’s one of the first cinematic epics to tackle the realities soldiers face when going to war, and became the standard that war movies would have to meet in the early days of talking pictures. Another film, 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein,” returned the original creative forces of director James Whale and star Boris Karloff after introducing the creature in the 1931 film. It introduces Elsa Lanchester as both the bride and Mary Shelley, the author of the “Frankenstein” novel. “Bride of Frankenstein” was considered the best sequel produced by Hollywood up until that time, and remains well regarded today.
Another influential film released at this time was “Annie Hall” in 1977. The winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture of that year and a movie that essentially invented the modern romantic comedy, “Annie Hall” is a hilariously (and painfully) truthful story about love and personal foibles. It features a standout performance by Diane Keaton that also netted a Best Actress win. On paper, this is a movie that probably would be the selection of the week, but the personal history of the director is one that gives me pause. There’s a movie that will be highlighted later in the summer that scratches a lot of the same itches that “Annie Hall” does, so I’m very OK with giving this movie a pass at this time, mainly since it’s a movie that has already received so much attention.
Back when baseball was still America’s pastime, Kevin Costner became a relatable everyman superstar on the backs of two movies about the game, 1988’s “Bull Durham” and 1989’s “Field of Dreams,” the latter of which premiered on this weekend. Phil Alden Robinson’s movie, based on W.P. Kinsella’s novel “Shoeless Joe,” is not subtle in laying out what it’s about upfront. However, it’s still as comfortable as a warm, Midwest American blanket. Costner plays Ray Kinsella, an Iowa family farmer who begins to hear voices that lead him to mow down his cornfield to build a baseball diamond. Achingly sentimental that punches you in the emotional tear ducts at the end, “Field of Dreams” was a hit in April, but viewings feel more appropriate around Father’s Day.
When “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was released in 2002, it ranked 20th overall for weekend box office grosses. It’s a pretty modest opening for the low-budget comedy that debuted in 108 theaters on April 19, but positive word-of-mouth kept the movie in theaters for a full year. Along the way, the buzz and fanfare kept growing and growing until it peaked in the summer of 2002, rising to second place in weekend box office sales for four weeks in a row five months after the film’s premiere. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” remains a significant landmark for independent features and theatrical runs, ending with a nearly $370 million worldwide gross off of a $5 million budget. Not bad, not bad at all. This weekend also produced several other appealing romantic comedies, including 1993’s “Benny and Joon,” 1995’s “While You Were Sleeping,” and 2008’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”
Two of the most acclaimed and influential filmmakers of the past 30 years also debuted two of their movies in April. Sofia Coppola was previously mainly known as the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, and miscast actress in her father’s “The Godfather Part III” from 1990. Sofia reframed her career by pursuing directing, and her debut feature was 2000’s “The Virgin Suicides,” a period coming-of-age drama starring Kirsten Dunst that opened with a limited release. Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino maintained his position atop the independent auteur class of his generation with “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” the second part of his martial arts revenge genre picture that was released this weekend in 2004.
Other notable films released in Week 16 include “Legend” in 1986; “Pet Sematary” in 1989; “Crank: High Voltage” and “17 Again” in 2009; “Kick-Ass” in 2010; “Unfriended” in 2015; and “The Jungle Book” and “Barbershop: The Next Cut” in 2016.
Next Week: “Fast Five”
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Mark is a longtime communications media and marketing professional, and pop culture obsessive.
