I like different movies and especially stories with cool plot twists in the vein of M. Night Shyamalan or David Fincher's Fight Club. So that the story is turned upside down and literally makes you "rethink" all the events of the movie that happened before. But alas, such films are not very suitable for multiple viewing and knowing how it all ends, it's not so interesting to watch them anymore. But there are pleasant exceptions and I watched the film Hot Fuzz by the British director Edgar Wright at least ten times and I consider it a real diamond in the genre of comedy action films.
The story revolves around tough cop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), who because of his extreme efficiency (which makes his colleagues look like real losers) gets assigned to the police station of the tiny town of Sandford, a regular "Village of the Year" winner.
After a bustling London - life in this quiet and peaceful place, where even a shoplifting cookie becomes an event, Angel and his partner - a charming country boy Danny (Nick Frost), spend their boring evenings watching classic action movies.
Suddenly a series of strange accidents begin and the pair have a lot of Real Police work to do to uncover this conspiracy. Only first they have to catch a swan who has escaped from one of the townspeople....
The trio of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost became known for the series Spaced, which was hugely popular with viewers and in fact proved to be the best comedy show of 1999 in the United Kingdom. Two years later, Edgar Wright, a talented director and screenwriter with Pegg and Frost, directed the comedy horror Shaun of the Dead, in which he brilliantly parodied most of the clichés of zombie movies and, as it turns out, they have great screenplays with Pegg.
Encouraged by the success of Shaun, the filmmakers continued to work together and, feeling that Britain was woefully short of its own cop films, embarked on their next project, which, in fact, was Hot Fuzz.
During 18 months of work (!!!) on the script Pegg and Wright watched 138 cop movies, conducted more than half a hundred interviews with policemen (the characters The Swan Escape and The Old Interpreter were based on the real life events) and the result exceeded all expectations.
Witty humor, sometimes turning into something reminiscent of Monty Python sketches, hundreds of references to both classic action films and new ones, a great pace of narration, but above all the "Chekhov guns" hanging here and there. As the Russian classic Anton Pavlovich Chekhov said, "If there's a gun hanging on the wall at the beginning of the play, it should go off by the end of the play," and there's more than enough of that in this film. Someone's last name, a photo in the newspaper, a fleetingly heard phrase, or a popular one among the townspeople becomes part of a big puzzle that is put together just before the big final battle. In fact, I consider the shootout in the final act to be one of the best scenes in cinema this century, with Simon Pegg riding into town on a horse and Nick Frost firing into the air screaming "A-A-A-A!" - is just fantastic.
And yes, "Hot Fuzz" is so layered that you watch it more than once, constantly discovering new funny hints, quotes and allusions that are impossible to catch at the first viewing and I think that even in ten times I didn't catch everything. Like Peter Jackson, the director of "The Lord of the Rings", who played the short role of "Santa the Bandit" in that film...
If by some miracle you missed this movie, make up for it immediately. A true masterpiece of British cinema.
Writen for CineTv & @raymondspeaks contest
