Absolutely…………………………………………..pointless. I know I’m running against the popular grain but this embarrassing rubbish does more harm than good to the British Film Industry which everyone claims to care about. Only a misguided loyalty wrongly applied to the poverty of imagination and sheer amateurishness of this cobbled together CONCEPT movie can explain the outrageously kind critical reception it has received. I’d love to see the promotional budget. It has been hawked and hyped and hustled comprehensively through many TV and radio programmes that ought to know better than to be used so cynically to con good money out of British cinema-goers.

That said – I confidently predict this half-witted twaddle will sit atop the British box office charts for a few weeks and sadly take enough easy money to add insult to injury by inflicting another derivative, crass, rip-off spoof upon an apparently acquiescent British movie-going public. I know how pompous and patronising this sounds. But please, I really don’t think the British public is dumb enough to think this arch cross between cod Ealing Comedy and an over-extended Benny Hill Sketch, without the laughs, represents the future of the British film industry.

I will bet every pound, in my pocket, that this was financed by American money. Only Americans could possibly believe this patronising, silly arse picture of English bobbies and a Somerset village, has enough truth in it to be a believable contrast to the super cool Point Break Hollywood cop movie to which it claims to pay homage. I don’t care what they do to the Bad Boys franchise but they really get me mad using one of my favourite thriller movies for spoofing. Hell these guys would mug Bambi to make a quick buck.

In fact, the over-reverential attitude to Ealing comedies has probably done more harm than good to our indigenous cinema. After Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, the rest are pretty thin and I doubt whether anyone under 30 would sit through them. The idea that this twee, profoundly middle-class collection of now archaic and hopelessly dated movies somehow represents British cinema at its best is such claptrap. And Hot Fuzz captures only the self-congratulatory amateurishness of the Ealing genre – none of its gentle irony or visual and verbal wit.

The sheer cynical desperation to get some youthful bums on seats for this one is shameful. Into the Kind Hearts and Coronets-like series of murders, the charmers who made this stuff have added some grotesque blood-spattering visuals. “Hey did ya see the blood fly as that guy was split in half by that wedge-shaped bit of masonry? Yeah and, sorry I can’t stop laughing, what about when the body then walked around with this f******* great lump of concrete for a head? And what about the old bird in the Gardening shop with the shears stuffed through her throat? But the bit I liked best, sorry, I can’t get my breath, was where that guy at the end flew through the air and had that bloody great spike stuck right up through his neck and jaw. But was still talking! F****** great! You really gotta go and see it. It’s f****** hilarious!

The plot of Hot Fuzz only ever looked good in the 3-line pitch that launched the worst waste of money since the Millennium Dome. Over-zealous idealistic young cop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is so good he makes the rest of his city colleagues look bad. So he’s exiled to a sleepy Somerset village where everyone looks inbred and acts like they just beamed down from the planet Zog. Almost every plot line is spoken with a tap-the-nose, know-what-I-mean seriousness that makes one long for the mindless, pointless car chases or shoot-em-up mayhem to begin. Our cranberry-juice-drinking hero having the only active brain cell functioning in the village, of course suspects that the endless series of fatal ‘accidents’ are murderous. Perhaps because more local residents get killed than in one and a half episodes Midsomer Murders, hitherto the only community on earth with a worse homicide rate than New York. Our Arch-Angel immediately suspects Timbo Dalton’s local businessman Simon Skinner presumably because of his suspiciously fruity voice, flashy cars and the fact that Dalton plays him as if he had ‘I’m the killer dear boy’ tattooed on his forehead.

Spoofs are derivative by definition. It is harder, not easier to make them funny. It requires visual and verbal imagination, flair, to wring all the possible humour out what is essential a one running gag movie. It is the humour of delicious surprise; turning our expectations on their head. Mocking a genre and our enjoyment of it, by exploding our assumptions about it, even our usual attraction to it. For Hollywood cop movies I guess things like - idiotically excessive testosterone fuelled action, violence, machismo, super-cool heroes etc etc. To make a bunch of British bobbies emulating Hollywood super-cops funny you have to make the British bobbies believable or the contrast upon which the humour, the joke, is based isn’t there. A Pantomime dame is funny because of the exaggeration and caricaturing of real grande dame old women with all their frills and flounces and mannerisms.

In the 70’s there were a series of James Bond spoofs. Variable in quality. But as the Bond movies themselves became more and more ‘unreal’, when they became a parody of themselves, they became literally spoof-proof. The last word on this subject goes to the sublime Tom Lehrer perhaps the funniest, wittiest, most stylish parodist and satirist ever: Lehrer gave up performing and went back to teaching mathematics at Harvard because he remarked – a real world run by the likes of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was simply beyond parody, unsatirisable.

Wright’s bobbies are simply too stupid, too obvious, too mind-numbingly cardboard to start with that he throws away the contrast which is the premise upon which any humour the spoof concept had in the first place was based. What is left is a muddled mess of wildly inconsistent tones and painfully laboured efforts to beat us over the head to laugh. We career from broad farce to the embarrassing sight of actors like Jim Broadbent having to utter ‘here’s the plot’ lines as if we are actually supposed to take them seriously. So when in doubt get noisy. Guns, explosions, crashes, chases fill in the void where invention should have been. That this is all edited with genuine skill only goes to prove that Wright has no excuse – he has enough professionalism to know better. Even one or two nice little sight gags referencing Hollywood movies prove that if the whole thing hadn’t been cobbled together so lazily, there might have been a funny movie in there somewhere.

Hot Fuzz is quintessentially English in one key respect. We are known the world over and mocked mercilessly by for example for by the French, (though what the French know about humour escapes me), as deeply addicted to the pun. Many cultures like such word play, however I think the English are unique in taking this nerdiness to the meta-level: we have an affection for the pun that is so bad, so teeth-achingly unfunny, that out of sheer ethnic perversity, we find its actual awfulness – funny. Hot Fuzz to a ‘T’. Only the English are so mentally deranged as to find something so bad funny just because of its irredeemable awfulness.

And what a waste of talent: Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan, Bill Bailey, Billie Whitelaw (oh Billie – how could you?), Edward Woodward, all pop in probably in their lunch break from some real acting work, to cameo silly, pointless roles for which whatever they got paid for a morning’s work was nowhere near enough. Nick Frost is the best act on show as Angel’s hero-worshipping, overweight, under-confident partner. But a very promising line of humour is just chucked into the mix and lost in the pot of message around it.

About the time you are finding some blessed relief by nodding off, the preposterous denouement, something about the Residents’ Association and winning the prettiest village award, deals the final blow to your will to live. Then no doubt to help the usherettes to clear the cinema, it’s back to a final crescendo of pointless noise, guns, explosions and crashes again.

Save your money. Put it towards that root canal dentistry you keep avoiding. It will be more fun.

(Sorry folks – I guess I went off on one there. But please……..give me strength!).

I really liked it! It wasn't so much spoof, more hommage, I thought. Had me laughing out loud several times, especially at the wordplay-iness of some of the dialogue.

But as I thought Babel was self-important, faux-earnest nonsense, I reckon we come at films from opposite starting points, Zettel.

I guess so Sammy. And vive la difference! Good job we don't all like the same thing. I know my son loved Fuzz too and he's been giving me stick about the review. Anyway in the end, I often disagree just as clearly with critics I like to read. I'd rather have someone who has a clear view than the wishy washy synoptic stuff.

However that too is a matter of choice.

Thanks for taking the trouble to comment.

Regards

Z

I quite enjoyed it too. Admittedly it's not the most cerebral of films ever made, nor is it as good as its predecessor, Shaun of the Dead, but it cheered me up on an otherwise drizzly and dull Sunday afternoon.

Sam

Don't want anyone to miss a film they'd get a bit of fun out of so its good to get the other vuew. Thanks Sam. And of course there were bits I laughed at as well. I do feel it was lazily put together and with a bit more imagination and flair, a really funny film could have been made.

To illustrate my point - go and see Robt Altman's last film A Prairie Home Companion (cos its a lovely warm funny little film, not for the point I'm making about it). One of many lovely threads in this movie is a running, genuinely ironic and affectionate homage to the Raymond Chandler private eye character played in PHC by Kevin Kline. He opens the film with the characteristic laid-back voice-over narrative. So cool, so world-weary, I've-seen-it-all nothing will phase me. Then throughout the film the Kline character is so laid back, so lost in his absurd fantasy of how cool he is that this leads him into a series of almost Clouseau-type cock-ups. Absolutely everything else is right, the hat, the style, the movement, the voice etc etc but the guy is just a Klutz. But never loses his absurd sense of his own cool. But as a recurring thread in a movie that pays genuine warm and loving homage to other lost aspects of American culture it is a priceless little cameo. All helped by the fact that Kline is one of the few droll actors around.

None of this, the film or Kline's role, is remotely cerebral or intellectual. And despite a key aspect of my critical stance, I like all kinds of films, especially I love good, funny trash. One of my favourite films is Message In A Bottle for God's sake - no one's gonna get intellectual about that. For me the Fuzz missed an opportunity and for me they left out the funny.

For readers who do use reviews as a guide to which film of so many to see, I think the key indicator for Fuzz is first of coure whether you liked Shaun of The Dead. If like me you didn't then the para in my review about the blood and carnage is key. Is this the kind of stuff you can find funny? Test case - were the gory biits of Monty Python's Holy Grail funny to you? If so you'll probably be ok with Fuzz.

Too long already but one last comment, and this is a forum after all: I confess I cannot watch what I would call films in the true horror genre. I get it but I can't share it. The only time I won't supsend my disbelief and enjoy the fantasy.

My fault. My weakness. But there.

If I have bored the hell out of you by now - thanks again for reading and commenting.

regards

Z



<Added>

infelicitous digit - I meant to say I didn't see Shaun, not that I didn't like it. Even I don't rubbish films I haven't seen.

Z

It's an interesting point about representing gore and graphic violence in films as funny. Many of the gory scenes in Hot Fuzz that are 'funny' may well have been banned, or at least heavily edited, not so many years ago.

The first time I can personally remember a film that presented a scene of graphic violence as comic was in Pulp Fiction. The scene I’m especially thinking of is the one in which a minor character accidentally gets their head blown off in the back of a car. The scene is initially shocking. But the situation is turned into comic farce, as they attempt to clear up the mess. There are earlier examples too, as you say, such has Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail. It is a fine line though. I still feel ambivalent about that scene in Pulp Fiction especially, and even some of the things in Hot Fuzz. But perhaps that's part of its allure, for me at least. The fact that a fine line is being called into play between what is funny and what is simply in very poor taste. I think some humour can work as a defence against the shocking nature of what is actually being shown. We all have our own level of what's acceptable though.

Anyway, thanks for the interesting (and not boring ) response. It's always good to question assumptions of what's acceptable and therefore 'funny'.

A Prairie Home Companion sounds good. I'll definitely have to put it on my Amazon rental list.
Sam

Sam

Such an interesting point. It seems to me, difficult though it is to judge, that one is almost driven to base reaction on the intention of the director. And as the whole insititution of the law in our culture demostrates, it is almost impossible to definitively prove an intention. Critically I suppose I'd have to say one can only legitimately look for evidence within the work. This is one of the reasons I have problems with Martin Scorcese's stuff. There seems a kind of secret relish in the whole macho, buddy, violent thing in his work, even though he makes it look ugly too.

Same thing with sex actually. It is a cliche to find titillating (they really should change that word) depiction of sex in a film ostensibly criticising the very attitudes it is so graphically showing. It's the oldest trick in the book to get soft porn to the screen.

Humour is also perhaps the most personal response of all. Put these two ambiguities together and it can be a real muddle. e.g I find Little Britain sometimes funny but mostly gross. And I could never take the Young Ones.

As for humour in violence. I take comfort in the fact that much of the laughter I hear at gross violence on screen appears to be nervous in character.

An interesting thread. I'd very much like to hear what other people think. Especially perhaps someone who likes Horror movies.

regards. thanks again for the comment. There is no greater compliment than that something one wrote provoked thought.

Z

Well, I went to see Hot Fuzz this afternoon and my worst fears were confirmed. It was the most piss-awful film I have seen in the cinema for many years. (Probably since the disastrous Matrix sequels of 2003...)

And I wasn't the only one who thought so. In a packed Odeon, I only remember hearing one big laugh during the entire thing, which happened when someone got hit by falling masonry. I laughed at that too, actually, as it was a brilliantly sick visual gag (Sorry Zettel!). That was my first laugh-out-loud moment - I had been sitting in the cinema for over an hour.

To be fair, I nearly laughed earlier at the scene when a fat cop had to chase a criminal over some fences, but ends up knocking them all over - unfortunately, I'd seen it before dozens of times in the trailer.

But inbetween those two scenes, and elsewhere, there was no laughter - just the sound of the audience losing interest and starting to chatter and drift away through the endless chasms between decent jokes.

What a contrast to the last British comedy I saw in the cinema, last year's Borat, when the audience started laughing from the moment the film started and never once stopped. But while Borat was surprising, subversive, anarchic and charming - Hot Fuzz was none of those things. Instead it was plodding, predictable and utterly pleased with itself.

What mostly passes for a joke in Simon Pegg's is making laboured references to other films and TV shows, endlessly winking at the audience: "Aren't we clever, we're quoting a famous line from Chinatown". Or knowingly saying "By The Power Of Greyskull" to each other! Ooh look! How clever! It's a quote from an old kids cartoon. Yes, we recognised it thank you. Why are you doing this ? It's not funny. I'd much rather have heard a joke.

Or perhaps I wouldn't, when a typical witty exchange runs along the lines:
"What made you want to be a policeman ?"
"You mean Officer."
"What made you want to be a policeman, Officer ?"
Hold my aching sides, I think I might need surgery.

But it's the arch knowingness of Hot Fuzz that sucks the life out of the script so utterly. They don't seem comfortable being funny, they have to let us know that they are being funny, constantly signalling "Look at us! We're being funny!" even though all we can see and hear is the tumbleweed rolling in. (You can tell they're all having fun, though, so that's all right.)

Before the movie, the Odeon ran a trailer for the upcoming Mitchell and Webb movie Magicians. The Magicians trailer contains a gag where Robert Webb ends up accidentally getting impaled on a spike. Their timing, and David Mitchell's facial expression, was perfect, and the audience roared as Webb got impaled. They then topped the gag with Webb moaning that "Ow... this kills" which also got a laugh. All done in next to no time and a perfect example of how to do short and funny.

The climax of Hot Fuzz contains exactly the same joke, where Timothy Dalton gets impaled on a spike much more gruesomely. Mock-dramatic music plays, and Dalton deliberately overacts the pantomime villain, groaning "This...really.... hurts". And predictably, the scene is filmed as a pastiche of a horror film. Absolutely nobody laughed. It wasn't funny. It was just there, unfolding leadenly without interest while everyone checked their watches and wondered how much longer there was to go.

Hot Fuzz ? More like a Wet Fish.

Thanks Griff - it's comforting to know that I haven't completely lost my sense of humour.

Its sort of

British Unfunny Long Laughless Sending Home In Trance

Z