-
Hot Fuzz — review
Hot Fuzz is a nice change from the kind of action trends apparent in the Hollywood motion picture industry. Because the United States is the cinematic capital country of the world, most actions include American versions of the police force. Now I don’t know how exaggerated they are, but World’s Scariest Police Chases make them seem accurate. Which makes the main thing to like about Hot Fuzz the way it combines those cliches with British policing. We don’t have Ford Crown Victorias, we have Vauxhall Astras. We don’t have gun-wielding officers, we have special divisions for that. And our uniforms are less subtle. Plus, we take a completely different approach, with community cohesion being considered more important than actually preventing crime. This clearly occurred to Wright and Pegg, who decided to make a statement about this by inserting American action cliches into a British environment, and created the town of Sandford, inspired by the real fake village used for training. It’s probably the most English place there is, because everyone’s white. And given what we later learn about Sandford, it seems that the Neighbourhood Watch Association has a racial motivation, along with everything else.