Hot Fuzz Sucked

“Hot Fuzz” should have been titled “Twit Brits.” It stars Timothy Dalton and his posse of British actors who used to do better but have made some bad career choices in the last 20 years, and two dudes from the surprise zombie-comedy “Shaun of the Dead.” As a glimpse into English cultural confusion, “Hot Fuzz” serves notice to viewers outside the British Isles that the UK is adrift in the modern era, simultaneously yearning for the high-tech future the EU represents and aggressively trying to maintain the country squire ideal. As Jonathan Wiener once argued, the point of modernity, for the English, has always been to make enough money to buy a pile in the country and leave modernity behind.

This movie got a viewing, however, not in the interest of dissecting the wacky British psyche, but rather as a diversion. I heard it was a comedy. In fact, the film isn’t even mildly amusing. This is not to say that it isn’t trying; there are obvious moments where the actors are trying to make jokes. But jokes, even dumb jokes, need to have punchlines, and none of the putative jokes in “Hot Fuzz” do. Just for one example, there’s the “Scottish”/retarded farmer who mumbles unintelligibly. Haha. I think I saw that, done better, albeit also not really that funny, in “Blazing Saddles” when I was about 10 years old. The “Scottish”/retarded farmer (I have to be uber-descriptive of the character because it would seem that all the “Scottish” folk in the film are retarded) has a tool shed full of heavy ordnance that he “just found”? Hilarious. Wait, was that a joke? No, no it wasn’t. On second thought, not hilarious. “Hey, Jamie, is your house full of illegal firearms?” “Mumble, mumble, skreee, skidoo…” “Well, where’d you get all of them?” “Mumble, mumble, hars n’ sich…” “Oh, I see. You just found them.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve never not laughed so hard.

The only other “humor” in the film appears to have been meant to come from the juxtaposition of a big-shot London cop with the sleepy little village he’s assigned to protect (after his bosses transfer him out of London because his dazzling record makes them look bad by comparison—now, that’s funny! Wait, no. That also isn’t funny. Hmm….). The first half of the film, in fact, is just one long variation of “hot-shot cop sees a petty crime being committed and blows his wad arresting the offender in over-the-top fashion, only to watch forlornly as his captain lets the perp off with a gentle scolding." Jesus, I’m going to piss myself with glee! No, wait. “Boredom.” Piss myself from boredom, is what I meant to say. I couldn’t get up and go to the bathroom, either, because what if I left just when the lone joke accidentally got out? In that one, throwaway line, I’ve just been 100% funnier than “Hot Fuzz.”

Now, I don’t do the *SPOILER ALERT* thing, because I don’t think knowing the end of a movie makes it any less enjoyable—anything worth watching is worth watching a few times, in which case you’ll already know the ending during most of the times you view a given feature. Only teenagers and people who watch disposable movies, made in the moment and useless thereafter, would give a shit about giving away the ending.

“Hot Fuzz” ends with a “cop”-out. (See? I’ve just been 200% funnier than the movie!) The story would have us believe that the entire town is so dedicated to preserving its quaint character that village leaders systematically murder anyone caught breaking the law or otherwise lowering the chances that it will win the “Village of the Year” award for all rustic England. So, everybody who’s been arrested and got off, soon found themselves abducted, murdered, and stashed under the old castle (yes, there’s a castle). But since the criteria for offenses against the town include aesthetic variances that alter its historic value, the townspeople have also killed a nouveau riche who built a gaudy mansion, some gypsies who hung around too long, and even their friends and neighbors who wanted merely to move away and make new lives in the modern world.

Nice twist, eh? Well, not really. See, in order for this plot—which isn’t funny, need I remind you again—to work, everyone in the town has to be in on it. But, they aren’t, as evidenced by the fact that the protagonist—who finds himself on the hit list about halfway through and spends the rest of the movie dodging assassins—is able to convince all the other cops to help him bust up the cabal of town leaders at the film’s climax. Um, weren’t they aware of the program? The hero’s partner, the son of the police chief, was. The police chief is the head of the murder council. And how big is this fucking town, anyway? It’s small enough so that, at times, everybody the protagonist meets is spying on him and reporting back to the village elders, but big enough to have a gypsy problem, unwelcome petty criminals who gravitated there for some reason, and most of all, it’s so big that in the end, when the main character literally kills every significant person in the town, there’s still enough people left that instead of returning to London when he’s proffered his old job (because, you know, London’s still a crime-ridden stinkhole), our hero decides to stay behind and become the new police chief in the village he just completely wiped out. Whew!

So, with that in mind, look: “Shaun of the Dead” was about two friends—incidentally, the two leads in this movie, Nick Pigg and Johnny Chill, or some such fake names—who try desperately to avoid the zombies that’ve taken over the city (world?). One of them, I think it’s Nick Pigg, gets infected but, since he can’t kill his friend, Johnny Chill builds a special bunker and keeps him locked up in it in the backyard for the rest of his life. He still gets to visit him. No word where he gets the brains from to feed the zombie-friend (“zombro”?). I may have mixed-up who did what, since both actors have equal parts forgettable and risible fake names.

The ending to that film is strikingly similar to “Hot Fuzz”: it’s an embrace of the familiar and homey and a rejection of the “sinister” future and the outside world. Zombie movies, in any context, are metaphors for xenophobia. And thanks to “Hot Fuzz,” we now have a fish-out-of-water cop “comedy” that subscribes to the notion that small towns are flapjackin’ awesome, cities are lame, and Scots are retards. On all three points, I disagree. As the protagonist goes screeching around the town at the end of "Hot Fuzz" in his souped-up police car, the message seems to be, "small towns are genuine and the people are, at heart, earthy and good. But, a little bit of modern life--like a hot rod police car--can fit in without changing how real everything is." My only question would be, "have you ever been to a small town?" The people in them look more like the murderous town council than the open, rough-but-friendly folks who (in the movie) are finally allowed to come to the fore once the aberrant village elders are gone (dead): the truly repugnant attitudes and practices that persist in this modern, liberal society have their roots in the country, not in the cities.

And, one more time for the Scotsmen who might be reading, this movie is not a comedy! Mumble, mumble, blarg begarrah!