Hot Fuzz (0/10)

by Tony Medley

If anything could drive someone from going to the movies on the regular basis, this gawdawful mess is a good candidate. Sitting through this 2 hour, four minute monstrosity was literally painful.

This is apparently intended to be a sendup of hero pictures where there’s a guy like Rambo who can clean up a bad town. The guy here is Nicolas Angel (Simon Pegg). I guess Pegg does a good job of interpreting the uptight, straight-shooting Angel, but he’s given a woeful script (by himself!). Angel is a super hotshot cop who arrests everyone in sight in London so he’s banished to the small village of Sandford, a place that is seemingly crime-free, and prideful of the awards it has won as an idyllic village. Alas, Angel feels something is amiss and he tries to investigate, with his partner, Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), whose old man is the police chief, Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent), only to be met with universal opposition. All the deaths that occur are passed off as “accidents.”

Pegg co-wrote the script with director Edgar Wright, the team responsible for Shaun of the Dead, which some considered a funny movie in 2004. I thought it was deplorable, so bad I finally walked out of it about a half hour before the end (and I had actually paid to get into it!). I wanted to walk out of this thing, but felt I had an obligation to write a review, so stuck it out. I was exhausted when it finally ended. This is such a terrible film, it was sheer agony to have to sit through it. In addition to all its other faults (like lack of humor and intelligence), there is no woman in it in any substantial role. There’s no love interest, no romance, no girlfriend. But, then, it would take a flawed women, indeed, to be interested in a dope like Angel.

Well, for that matter, there isn’t anything else in the film, either, except ridiculous, excessive, gratuitous violence, all played for laughs. As to the latter, not only did I not laugh, I didn’t even smile once. Even with the worst of modern film comedy, read Will Ferrell, I occasionally smile. That didn’t happen once. The lady sitting next to my friend was rolling in the aisles, however. So I guess that there is a species of creature that can find this humorous, probably comprised of those who have been weaned on Ferrell, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler, et al., whose senses of humor have been so badly trained by those unfunny comics that they cannot distinguish between what is truly funny and what they are told to believe is funny.

If you are interested in a competent, intelligent, funny satire, forget this and wait for Death at a Funeral that comes out the end of May.

March 23, 2007