Supercop
Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is so good at his job he makes his fellow
Met officers look bad, so his superiors reassign him to the Somerset
town of Sandford, a sleepy rural community where the main hazards are
underage drinkers and an escaped swan.
Partnered with the bumbling but well-meaning action-film junkie PC Danny
Butterman (Nick Frost), Angel does his duty in his subdued surroundings.
But on closer investigation, Angel discovers not all is as innocent
as it seems as a series of grizzly ‘accidents’ plague the
town, seemingly revolving around the smarmy manager of the local supermarket
(Timothy Dalton), and sets out to crack the case. An undertaking which
ultimately involves the need for some serious firepower…
Hot Fuzz, as with any new action film, could all so easily
descend into cliché, if it wasn’t written by Simon Pegg
and Edgar Wright. Like Tarantino and Rodriguez before them these two
make it their stock-in-trade to draw upon their encyclopaedic knowledge
of every movie in the genre to take everything you know, everything
you’ve seen before and deliver every genre convention you’d
want back to you with a fresh comic twist. As you’d expect from
these two the references come thick and fast, ranging from subtle homage
to blatant theft from the likes of Point Break, Way of
the Gun, and the works of Michael Bay and John Woo. The action
never descends into lampooning or Scary Movie-style send-up,
but rather is lovingly rendered in it’s conformity to and challenging
of the conventions of the genre.
No cop movie would be complete without a mismatched partnership who
eventually grow to rely on each other, and it’s here that the
perfect comic chemistry between the two leads shines through again,
not just in the comedic pairing of Pegg’s straight man to Frost’s
idiotic manchild, but through their natural rapport they are also able
to send up the homoerotic undertones of any buddy cop movie to perfection.
All in all, a cavalcade of comedy, crash-zooms on cocking guns and kick-arse
action - everything you could want, basically. The boys have done good
yet again.
by Phil Dixon
Nick
Frost, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
talk to The National Student
