Monday, April 23, 2007

Yarp


Know what you should do? I mean, all of you. Every last one of you. Man, woman and swamp monster. You should hightail it to your nearest darkened theatre and spend two hours basking in the glory that is Hot Fuzz.


Now, if you’ve seen Shaun Of The Dead, you might be aware of this movie. After all, its got the same two actors, Simon Pegg & Nick Frost.


If, however, you are a swamp monster without a passing interest in recent British comedies, here’s the skinny. Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop movie parody, much like Shaun was a zombie movie parody. Anyway, Nicholas Angel is a London supercop. He’s so good, in fact, that he gets “promoted” to sergeant and transferred to a small village in the country because he’s making the rest of the department look bad. So Sgt. Angel arrives in the village of Sanford, a town voted the best in England with a non-existent crime rate. The first half of the movie concerns itself with Nick being a by-the-book cop trying to adjust to the rural and rather lazy local force and being partnered with Police Constable Danny Butterman, the Inspector’s son. Then the “accidents” start happening.


In the interests of not getting into spoiler territory, the two do as buddy cops do. They bond, they learn from each other, and stop some crime. The first half of the movie isn’t necessarily slow. You know that foundations are being laid, red herrings being dangled, but you’re trying to piece it all together. Then it all gets put together and the swerve it takes is both brilliant and incredibly creepy. And then of course, this being a buddy cop movie, the climax is a hail of bullets, but my God is it one of the most incredible shootouts I’ve ever seen on film, and its compounded by the nature of the people involved in the shootout. I honestly can’t say any more about it without ruining it, so just trust me. Trust a faceless, random voice on the internet.

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