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What kept striking me throughout Hot Fuzz is how great it is to see a balls-to-the-wall action movie that's British. The film overtly references American blockbusters like Bad Boys II but is undeniably British in its flavour. There is a considerable cast of quirky characters, pretty much all of whom are amusing, and some are hilarious. The cast features an extensive list of British comedy talent, with cameos galore by some fairly big names. Two of my favourite characters in the film were 'the Andys', detectives who steal every scene they're in (played by Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall). Timothy Dalton has great fun too, hamming it up as a supermarket manager. Nick Frost, playing the bumbling sidekick to Simon Pegg's supercop, is both funny and endearing. That the film includes so many memorable characters is largely down to the witty and creative script, written by Pegg and director Edgar Wright. In fact, it's really cleverly constructed in that everything that is mentioned in passing, even minor things, have a point by the end. Wright, Pegg and co certainly have no lack of ambition, and it's this that leads to one of the film's flaws: it's just so jam-packed with characters, plot twists and action that it begins to feel slightly bloated and overlong. The storyline takes a different direction from what I had expected (going to some surprisingly dark and grisly places) but I actually really liked that as it meant that the narrative took some pretty unpredictable turns. In the middle the film is a murder mystery, becoming an action-fest in the third act. While a lot of the action is very entertaining and deliberately overblown, the fighting went on for too long, partly due to having so many loose ends to tie up. Wright also lifted stylistic touches from Tony Scott and Michael Bay, using crash zooms and rapid edits, which at first were a novelty but got a little repetitive (to be fair, Wright has used the techniques before but never quite as much as in this film). I only have these criticisms because my anticipation of the film was so high; Hot Fuzz does not reach classic status in my view but it is great fun and very original too.
The summary
Funny, gruesome, action-packed, surprising, overlong, intriguing, extremely likeable and British just about encapsulates Hot Fuzz.
