nuts4chic - film review
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by Vera Brozzoni The same team of Shaun Of The Dead is back, alive and kicking: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg at the script, Pegg himself as lead actor and Nick Frost as his perfect stooge. But this time around, the evil community that puts Pegg in great danger is not an armada of zombies, but the dwellers of a heavenly little town in North England called Sandford.
Anyone who loves cinema should be glad that Wright, Pegg and Frost have teamed up again, and their load of meta-filmic irony has just grown bigger and bigger. In fact Hot Fuzz doesn’t only make continuous references to films that made history, such as The French Connection or Goodfellas, but also to Michael Bay’s worst flicks ever, Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, and still sounds believable. Also, dialogues from Shaun Of the Dead are re-done and just prove how hilarious was the team’s previous labour of love. Even the cast features iconic faces that made their name in genre cinema, especially Timothy Dalton (his best appearance in years) and evergreen Billie Whitelaw, who hasn’t lost an ounce of the evil she sported in the original The Omen; plus a very well concealed (masked, to be true) cameo courtesy of Cate Blanchett. And watch out for the ominous way the characters are named: the axis of good counts an Angel and a Butterman, whereas the axis of evil boasts a Skinner, a reverend Shooter and… constable Thatcher. But Hot Fuzz is not just a hotchpotch of quotes sewn together by some B-film buzz who watched too much Tarantino: it is a genuinely enjoyable, hilarious, intelligent take on action cinema and a great performance by Simon Pegg. Our hero’s face is sculpted in stone, and keeps painfully cool even while he’s making us laugh our lungs out: which proves that old master Buster Keaton’s lesson is still valid today.
There are even some hints of homosexuality that never go off the tracks: the relationship between Angel and Butterman sometimes dangerously veers towards Brokeback Mountain territory, but what both of them are looking for, in the end, is not mere excitement but a meaning to their job, something to be proud of. And they will find it in turning Sandford upside down, in a triumph of tongue-in-cheek violence that actually becomes the peacefully murderous community. The usual pattern of uber-zealous cop plus slacker stooge is here enhanced by the whole police crew of Sandford: ridiculous moustachios and dull policewomen with an unbearable laugh spending their days endlessly feasting on cake and ice cream while their neighbours quietly disappear or are blatantly murdered in gushes of fake blood. As for the villains, it is enough to say that the final showdown takes place in a real Somerfield branch between codfish and Dolmio pasta sauce (“You’ve got red on you!” “It’s all right, Andy! It’s Bolognese!”), and that in the end, all they wanted was to win the competition for the best model village in England – beware!
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Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is such a good policeman in London, that makes all his colleagues look bad: so the Chief Inspector (a surprisingly ironic Bill Nighy) sends him to a sleepy hamlet that has too many secrets to hide… it will be Angel’s duty, backed by reluctant daydreaming constable Butterman, to wash the dirty linen in public and get rid of a sect of upstanding citizens with bloodstained hands. 
