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| Hot
pursuit: (l-r) Frost and Pegg in Hot Fuzz. |
Lethal
Countryside
By
Laura Leon
Hot
Fuzz
Directed
by Edgar Wright
At first glance, Hot Fuzz would seem to be a bit of
sheer silliness offered up by the team that brought us Shaun
of the Dead, in which zombies terrorized a working-class
English community intent on retaining its bits of everyday
normalcy amid the carnage. Clearly, screenwriters Simon Pegg
and Edgar Wright, the latter of whom also directs, savor the
opportunity to poke fun at big-budget Hollywood cop action/buddy
films—and when you think about it, what’s not to laugh at?
All in all, a good warm-weather treat.
Hot
Fuzz, however, is more than that, and certainly more than
the sum of its parts. Sure, Pegg wants to send up the badass,
take-no-prisoners kind of cop often personified these days
by Will (Bad Boys) Smith or Keanu (Point Break)
Reeves, and so what if in the process he wants to blow shit
up? Somehow, Pegg and Wright manage to do all these, keep
it consistently funny and also satirize the whole notion of
the quaint English countryside as typified by any number of
PBS series or movies like the latest version of Pride and
Prejudice.
Pegg plays Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a cop who is just so darn
good at his job that he makes the other blokes on the force
look really, really bad. With the sound of his former associates
cheering his professional demise, he’s sent packing to the
stultifyingly dull village of Sandford, where the biggest
crime is the disappearance of the vicar’s pet swan. Here,
villagers on neighborhood safety patrols and outfitted with
walkie-talkies happily greet their new constable as a fellow
traveler in the ways of keeping home and hearth safe and secure
from outside or wanton forces. Angel’s new, er, beatmate,
Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), peppers him with questions like
“Have you ever shot off two pistols whilst flying through
the air?,” gleaned from his keen understanding of the lives
and routines of Hollywood cops. Danny is the type of bloke
who can talk at length why Bad Boys II is a much better
film than its predecessor.
Before long, Angel begins to realize that a series of ghastly
events in Sandford are not merely accidents, but quite likely
murder; the town, and commanding officer Frank Butterman (Jim
Broadbent), cozily tut-tut his assertions. After suffering
humiliation in the presence of the entire force, Angel retreats,
but then, emboldened by the action flicks that Danny has plied
him with, comes back with a vengeance to wreak havoc on those
responsible for the mysterious deaths.
It sounds silly, and maybe it is. What helps is the actual
motivation behind the crimes—which good sportsmanship forbids
me from revealing in the slightest—and the utmost seriousness
with which Pegg and Wright develop the story. Lots of fast
edits and cuts evoke the style of Lethal Weapon-type
movies, but the joke is that, in the end, they are dramatizing
nothing more riveting than administrative paperwork. The filmmakers
use Angel’s click of a ballpoint pen in the same way Sergio
Leone would use the sound of a cocked trigger.
For all its pointed jabs at Hollywood, Hot Fuzz has
a warm fuzzy working for those old movies in which Margaret
Rutherford portrayed Miss Jane Marple. Anyone familiar with
that Christie sleuth will remember that she always found the
most interesting acts of evil happening in the most unexpected,
out-of-the-way places—notably, sleepy English villages. Pegg
and Wright play with this idea, but update it to include wry
commentary on such things as modernization, gentrification
and neighborhood associations. Somehow, and again, possibly
because of all the silliness, it works refreshingly
well.
Banality
of Evil
Fracture
Directed
by Gregory Hoblit
I’m reasonably certain director Gregory Hoblit didn’t set
out consciously to remake a dull version of Silence of
the Lambs. Yet, Fracture’s presentation of a battle
of wits between a homicidal genius and a precociously talented
representative of law and order does seem a little familiar.
The fact that Fracture stars Hannibal Lect . . . I
mean Anthony Hopkins . . . as said homicidal genius makes
the comparison inescapable. Fracture suffers badly
in the comparison.
Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, an aviation mogul who discovers
his wife’s affair and then shoots her point-blank in the face.
Ryan Gosling plays Willy Beachum, a brash assistant district
attorney with a 97-percent conviction rate. Though Willy has
finagled a luxe gig as a corporate attorney and has just a
week left in the DA’s office, he takes on the task of prosecuting
Crawford after being made a fool of by the wily defendant
during his arraignment. Willy hates to lose. Unsurpisingly,
we then get a bunch of scenes of Hopkins being gleefully evil
and teasing as the two square off in court, over the phone
or holding-cell interview tables. It’s a race against the
clock as Willy tries to turn up new evidence to convict Crawford,
to save his own reputation, secure his new job and his new
love interest. If it sounds exciting, I’ve misled you.
Nothing in this movie quite clicks. Perhaps aware of the likely
comparisons to Silence of the Lambs, Hoblit pulls back
on the thrills, letting his camera linger, slowing the pace
and focusing on faces and character. It’s an interesting idea;
it just doesn’t work. In part it’s due to the problematic
casting of Hopkins. In part, it’s that the script, while competent,
is stock TV cop-drama stuff. Gosling—a very good and charismatic
actor who more than holds his own with Hopkins—is wasted in
this role. He’s bogged down in a totally superfluous romantic
subplot and taxed with some leaden dialogue.
At one point during the movie, I thought it could have been
saved if the roles had been reversed: if Hopkins had played
the lawyer with his reputation on the line, and Gosling had
been given the meatier role of charming psychopath. That,
I thought, would have sidestepped the Silence of the Lambs
criticism. Then I realized that Hoblit has already made
that movie, and so I would have just ended up panning a dull
remake of his own 1996 film Primal Fear.
—John
Rodat
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