Wright’s over-the-top, parodic, buddy cop action-comedy is ‘pop’ confetti cinema in pleasing, anything-goes mode, as a police sergeant reassigned to a sleepy countryside town must contend with a spate of gruesome murders. 

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This was my first-ever Edgar Wright movie when I saw it in cinemas during my novice cinephile era.  I remembered it to be over-the-top and ridiculous but exciting, fun and funny. 

It was only years later with The World’s End (2013) that I realised Wright’s whirlwind-filmmaking-cum-hyperactive-editing style was a thing. 

And like Quentin Tarantino, Wright takes genre filmmaking to its logical extreme and then turns it on its head.  It’s ‘pop’ confetti cinema—pleasing and jolting in the same register, and Hot Fuzz very much lives and breathes that mantra. 

Revisiting it after more than 15 years, I remember the film as if I had seen it yesterday—the crude humour (bless Olivia Colman in a sharp-witted supporting role), the gory violence, and the all-guns blazing buddy cop action-comedy that it tries to mimic, parody, and in one fell swoop, transcend all its conventions. 

Hot Fuzz does have its flaws—it can get a bit ‘too much’, occasionally exhausting, but generally, it is excellent and well-executed. 

“It’s not murder, it’s ketchup.”

Wright’s work is the more ‘conceited’ cousin of Rian Johnson’s ‘Knives Out’ (2019, 2022) pictures.  Instead of Daniel Craig’s rather laidback detective Benoit Blanc, we have Simon Pegg’s Nicholas Angel, a London police sergeant who has overachieved so much as an exemplary civil servant that he is reassigned to a sleepy countryside town. 

When gruesome murders occur, Nicholas senses something amiss when everyone, including his colleagues, seems to brush them off as ‘accidents’. 

With deliberate misdirections, a topsy-turvy plot and exuberant film language that might give you whiplash, Wright shows us what it means to entertain the hell out of audiences. 

It’s not for everyone, certainly not for family viewing, but Hot Fuzz’s sense of (mis)adventure is quite the revitalising push for more inventive, anything-goes, action filmmaking that maintains a good-natured if cheeky sense of law and order. 

Grade: B+

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