Hot Fuzz
Directed by Edgar Wright
Hot Fuzz, a new British comedy, is one of the most inventive movies I’ve ever seen. It’s so inventive, in fact, that it’s a bit bewildering. At any given moment you’re not quite sure if what you’re watching is a humorous character piece, a serial-killer gorefest, a heartwarming portrait of a friendly village, or a portrait of a seemingly friendly village that hides terrible secrets.
The truth is that the whole thing is a complex put-on in the manner of a Russian doll. It’s a spoof inside a spoof inside a spoof. Hot Fuzz is a parody so sophisticated that even when it seems not to be parodying anything, you figure out later that it was, in fact, parodying something, but so quietly that you didn’t notice, and therefore you actually misunderstood what you were watching.
Furthermore, so many different types of movies are being parodied in so many different ways that it’s hard to keep track. For its first 15 minutes, Hot Fuzz plays riffs on every movie and television show you’ve ever seen about taciturn, by-the-book, big-city cops. Then it shifts gears for a half-hour or so and becomes a gentle sitcom in which our big-city cop finds himself having to adjust to life in a dear little provincial burg where nothing bad ever happens.
That’s before people start getting slaughtered in extraordinarily gruesome ways–murders so gruesome that viewers who were enjoying the sitcom about the lovely small town may suddenly feel like they need airsickness bags to deal with the popcorn and soda they were happily ingesting.
Then you’re into a buddy picture for a bit before Hot Fuzz goes completely and triumphantly insane with a hilarious climactic sequence that cannot be described in any way–because to do so would be to ruin it and (provided you can take the extreme violence or can close your eyes very fast when you sense it coming) this is really a movie you ought to see.
The director is named Edgar Wright. He wrote the movie with an actor named Simon Pegg, who plays the leading role. Previously, they made a movie together called Shaun of the Dead about a slacker who rids London of a zombie infestation in order to win back his girlfriend. I haven’t seen Shaun of the Dead, but the storylines of the two movies clearly indicate that Wright and Pegg are a couple of serious fanboys. And they are just the kind of fanboys who might give fanboydom a good name.
The term “fanboy” refers to the sort of person who becomes consumed with all aspects of a pop subculture: a Talmudist whose object of study isn’t the Bible but rather a comic-book character, a video game and its characters, or a series of movies. The greatest concentration of fanboydom is in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, but you can find fanboys of all kinds.
The Internet has been kind to fanboys, who now run websites dedicated to their obsessions and can actually make some money off them. Alas for them, back in the 1970s, fanboys could find comradeship only in the sad confines of comic book stores populated by ill-kempt and infrequently bathed young men. In the 1980s, they made their homes-away-from-home in the weirder and more comprehensive video-rental stores.
To date, the most successful fanboy of them all is Quentin Tarantino, the longtime video store clerk who spent his first 25 years watching every movie ever made–and then showed uncommon gumption in stealing the plots and styles of little-known Asian action movies and turning them into films of his own hailed by critics who didn’t yet know the work Tarantino was so mischievously ripping off.
Tarantino recently told GQ that he has long had the sense he was William Shakespeare in a previous life. Not that he wishes this were true, mind you: “I don’t really care about Shakespeare. I’ve never been into Shakespeare, but then people are constantly bringing up all of these qualities in my work that mirror Shakespearean tragedies and moments and themes.”
You know, it’s true. In Tarantino’s latest film, Grindhouse, he shows four car wheels dismembering the skulls of four young women in slow motion, over and over again. I could not help bringing to mind that great scene in Queen Alexandra and Murray, Shakespeare’s 38th play, in which Queen Alexandra says to Murray, “What ho, Murray. What could it have been that I have seen! Is it not in my marrow? Are we not one to ourselves?”
To which Murray replies, “What are you hollering? You’ll wake up the whole castle.”
Sadly, Queen Alexandra and Murray has been lost in the mists of history. We only know about it from the 2,000 Year Old Man, who invested money in it. “It never came to light,” the 2,000 Year Old Man explained. “It closed in Egypt.”
The original “2,000 Year Old Man” skits, performed by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner almost 50 years ago, comprise a peerless example of how to take two disparate cultural phenomena (Yiddish-inflected humor and the hugely popular middlebrow accounts of world history by Will and Ariel Durant), throw them in a blender, and make something entirely new out of the mix. That is what Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have done with Hot Fuzz.
In true fanboy fashion, Wright and Pegg have obviously seen every cop-action movie made since 1980 a dozen times. But what they’ve done with their fanboy knowledge is to take their source material, mix it up with soft-focus English comedy, and present us with a flavorful pudding that is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before. Hot Fuzz isn’t just a homage to Lethal Weapon or a send-up of Lethal Weapon. In every way, it’s a better, richer, and more memorable movie than Lethal Weapon or the hundreds of pieces of worthless junk that followed in its wake.
These fanboys have done what Quentin Tarantino cannot do, and what most fanboys don’t even try to do. They have succeeded in transcending the trash that initially inspired them.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
