Law and Disorder

The following Movie-Movie blurb is reprinted from Providence Monthly Online

If you watched and enjoyed 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, the Brit parody of zombie flics, from the writing team of director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg, you’ll know exactly what your in for with their latest effort, Hot Fuzz. The talented (and amusing) duo have turned the lenses, replete with their brand of deadpan silliness, onto yet another shaggy dog Hollywood genre, the buddy-cop movie, with the results blithely enticing. Pegg plays an annoyingly spot-on and maddeningly successful London copper who gets sent by his disdainful (and cowed) superiors to exile in some quaint countryside village where the biggest crime is either an escaped animal or a drunken villager. One of these tipsy figures (Nick Frost) turns out to the pudgy son of the chief inspector and the exiled bobby’s new partner, plus an earnest student of the kind of law and disorder seen in American movie crowd-pleasers like the Bad Boys or the Lethal Weapons series. Together, the two plunge straight into an attempt to solve a sudden and unexpected killing spree and the movie gets to its reason d’etre--a felicitous spoof of the cop-buddy film; as everything starts blowing up, guns manage to get shot sideways by airborne shooters, the chases are on, and the slo-mo recoil shot rears it’s ugly head. While Hot Fuzz works amicably as a mocking pastiche, Wright and Pegg are onto a bit more than that, and the movie archly peers under the surface of English pastoral life (as Shaun did with London pub culture) and tweaks it with an understated precision.