Film
Bristol Film Festival: Hot Fuzz
- Director
- Edgar Wright
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 115 mins
“You want to be a big copper in a small town, fuck off up the model village!” Despite being London’s finest police officer, Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg, in his straightest role to date) doesn’t exactly get a warm welcome from his fellow plods when he’s transferred to the sleepy Somerset village of Sandford (or Wells, as we knows it round these parts) to prevent him continuing to embarrass the Met with his excessive competence. Yep, the team behind that likeable, massively popular Brit “romzomcom” Shaun of the Dead hit upon another winning premise that relocates a US-dominated genre staple to a parochial setting, creating the most defiantly English popcorn flick this side of Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This time it’s “Midsomer Murders directed by Michael Bay”, with a fish-out-of-water twist. Once again, the co-writing team of director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg manage to indulge their fanboy nerdery by chucking in plenty of references to cop flicks (Bad Boys II, Point Break) and horror movies (The Omen, The Wicker Man, obvious antecedent Straw Dogs), while indulging their penchant for pleasingly excessive comedy gore, without ever permitting the whole thing to degenerate into scrappy parody. There are also more West Country accents here – some of them authentically unintelligible – than we’ve ever heard on screen before, which must surely be a cause of enormous local pride.
After an opening blizzard of crash cuts and cameos (Martin Freeman! Steve Coogan! Bill Nighy!), the film calms down a bit when Angel arrives in Somerset to find that his solemn adherence to PC vocab guidelines and by-the-book approach to law and order count for little in a town where it’s reasoned that the best way to keep an eye on underage hoodies is corral them in the pub. Partnered with oafish, hero-worshipping constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), son of police chief Frank (Jim Broadbent), our starchy, humourless hero finds there’s little crime-fighting to do. But then folks start coming over all dead, and the sinister local Neighbourhood Watch Association (NWA – geddit?) seems to have something to do with it. Two hours sure is a long time for a comedy, but there’s never a dull moment during the extended shootout in Somerfield and carnage in Cathedral close.
This Bristol Film Festival screening kicks off a series of suitably crime’n’punishment-related features screened in the former cells below the Bridewell Police Station – aka The Island. Go here for tickets.
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