Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Fun
with Guys with Guns
(Hot Fuzz, 5/7/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Recent
events in Virginia and Iraq have put Guys With Guns back on the agenda.
The Bureau of Justice reports that over the last 28 years, more than
91% of gun-related murders in the US were perpetrated by guys. Almost
83% of the victims were also guys. If Guys with Guns were a new product
being tested for safety today, their makers would be laughed out of
court. If the problem was conceived like any other social issue in America,
there would be an official "War on Guys with Guns."
And so, while a light-hearted spoof
like Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz provokes its share of laughs, the
laughs now have a decidedly hollow ring. This isn't the movie's fault.
For their part, Wright and partner Simon Pegg are only trying to do
for the shoot 'em up potboiler what they did for the zombie thriller
in Shaun of the Dead—satirizing a popular genre by replicating
it, only in the twee, eccentric context of modern Britain. The result
is as bizarre as staging the gunfight at OK Corral in an assisted living
center in Coral Gables, FL.
Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a super-gung-ho
London cop. Angel has an arrest record 400% higher than the department
average, but this earns him no gratitude at Scotland Yard, where his
gaudy competence only serves to make his colleagues look bad. Put to
pasture in the quiet "model village" of Sandford, Angel finds
an admirer in pudgy PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), but not much street
action. When an apparently unrelated string of townspeople turn up grotesquely
dead, the local cops prefer to think of them as accident victims. PC
Angel suspects worse. As he investigates, he loosens up enough to teach
PC Butterman such essential skills as how shoot two pistols while flying
through the air, and how to suck a toothpick while mowing down the bad
guys.
There's a story here, and even a
character or two, but the real pleasure is the way the movie riffs on
the bottomless legacy of testosterone-fueled actioners. At one point,
PC Butterman actually tries to reassure Angel by telling him, a la
the end of Chinatown, "Forget it Nicholas, it's Sandford."
At least in that instance Wright and Pegg are satirizing a good movie—in
this universe, so-bad-they're-good cult favorites like Point Break
and Bad Boys also rise to the level of fundamental texts.
All this seems like a thin foundation
on which to build a movie that runs more than two hours. Sure enough,
Hot Fuzz drags mightily in the second act, only salvaging itself
with a brilliantly realized fifteen-minute outburst of comic gunplay
to close the story. If there can be such a thing as a sarcastic action
sequence, Wright and Pegg actually find a way. But the whole thing seems
just a little overstretched.
This kind of spoof is more clever
than new. Shawn of the Dead was funny, but hardly anything unique—people
have been poking fun at zombie horrors for as long as George Romero
has been making them. (Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead
is funnier than Shawn, and came out about twenty years earlier.)
Likewise, I'm not sure in what universe a send-up of he-man action flicks
counts as something fresh, but it surely isn't the universe we live
in. Indeed, it's almost impossible to explain how schlock-slingers like
Michael Bay and Tony Scott can live with themselves without believing
they are also satirizing the genre, at least on some level. Is it really
necessary to lampoon something that insists on lampooning itself?
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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