Review: Hot Fuzz

It's easy to describe Hot Fuzz as Shaun of the Dead meets any of the Lethal Weapon movies, and if you need to come up with a one-line summary that everyone will get then that's a pretty good one.

If Hot Fuzz is anything meets anything, it's the tv series Keen Eddie as re-imagined by Mel Brooks for the BBC, if Mel Brooks still made good parodies and if the producers could talk Jasper Fforde into punching up the script.

I enjoyed Hot Fuzz, of course: I'm a big fan of everything mentioned above. Yes, it dragged in the middle, but most two-hour movies do. The rest of it was plain ol' fun.

Would it have been better with zombies? Of course: Everything's better with zombies. But Hot Fuzz makes up for the lack of zombies by featuring XTC's "Sgt. Rock (Is Going To Help Me)" over a set of pub scenes near the beginning. This makes it very likely that the number of people who've heard the song over the past couple of months is substantially larger than the number of peopole who heard it in its prior twenty-odd years of existence.

And that, my friends, is the state of the art.