Last Updated on January 31, 2025
INTRO: After working together on the TV shows Asylum and Spaced, director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg decided to take their collaboration to the big screen with Shaun of the Dead. They wrote that film together, crafting a comedy built on the foundation of their shared love for George A. Romero’s zombie movies. It turned out to be a well-reviewed international hit… and then Wright and Pegg had to figure out how to keep their film careers going with a good follow-up. This time they decided to channel their appreciation for action movies into the buddy cop comedy Hot Fuzz, which we’re looking at in this episode of Revisited.
SET-UP: While some refer to Hot Fuzz as a spoof, that is not a description Wright and Pegg used for their own movie. Their objective was not to critique or make fun of action movies, as they had a sincere affection for them. Noting a lack of good British cop action movies, they wanted to create one of their own – and bring it to the screen in the style of an American cop action movie. Plus, audiences had loved the chemistry that Pegg had with his Shaun of the Dead co-star Nick Frost, and the buddy cop set-up seemed like a great way to put that chemistry at the center of another film. Pegg described Hot Fuzz as a Valentine to action movies. It just happens to be a strongly comedic Valentine, deriving humor from its setting, characters, and the way it comments on the genre’s clichés.
As the filmmakers pointed out, the average British beat cop doesn’t really appear to be a prime candidate for action movie stardom. They wear uniforms with funny hats and sweaters, and they don’t carry firearms. That’s exactly the sort of characters they wanted to make their film about. Then they took these overlooked heroes and put them in the kind of location you don’t often see in action movies; a small, rural town in England. Hot Fuzz starts out looking like it’s just going to be a goofy story about a big city cop being sent off to a small town where nothing ever happens, so he has to bust country folk for mundane crimes. But by the end he and his small town partner are participating in some big action sequences.
Wright and Pegg were not in a rush to get their Shaun of the Dead follow-up out into the world. They spent eighteen months working on the first draft of the script, then put another nine months into doing revisions. During that time, they did some serious action movie research. They estimate they watched something like one hundred and thirty-eight cop movies along the way. Dirty Harry, Lethal Weapon, Point Break, L.A. Confidential, they were all on the list. Even lesser Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris films proved to be useful in their research… and they found great inspiration in the overblown, high octane insanity of Bad Boys II. They saw plenty of clichés they could dig into for laughs, and Roger Ebert’s book Bigger Little Movie Glossary pointed out more they could include.
Several of the movies they watched would also go on to inspire elements of the Hot Fuzz marketing campaign. Posters for the film were created in the style of posters for Bad Boys, Bad Boys II, Magnum Force, and the 2006 version of Miami Vice.
In addition to all that movie-watching and studying, Wright and Pegg conducted dozens of interviews with real-life police officers and took tours of small police stations. Some of the stories they were told by actual cops were worked into the script. The swan-on-the-run element of the film was one of the true stories, and so was the scene where a translator is needed to decipher the unique version of English spoken by a farmer.
Frost was the first person who got to see the script once it was complete, and during the rehearsal process he was given the chance to come up with lines that could be added in. Once they were on set, Wright preferred to stick to the shooting draft of the script rather than have a bunch of improv going on.
The character written for Pegg is super-cop Nicholas Angel, by far the best and most efficient police officer working in London. His arrest record is four hundred percent higher than any other officer… which doesn’t make him popular with his fellow cops. The decision is made to promote Angel to Sergeant and transfer him. He would rather stay in London, but the higher-ups want him out of the city so he’ll stop making everyone else look bad. He’s sent far out into the country, to the fictional village of Sandford, Gloucestershire. Which is said to be the safest village in England. At first Angel has trouble adjusting to how laid back everything is in Sandford, but it soon becomes obvious that this place isn’t as peaceful and safe as it’s reported to be.
When picking the villains for an action movie, the first choices that come to mind might be drug smugglers, drug runners, human traffickers, even terrorists. But Wright and Pegg didn’t take their cop movie in that direction. The antagonists in this film are more along the lines of a Dirty Harry movie than a Lethal Weapon movie. While people around town appear to be dying in tragic, gory accidents, Angel quickly deduces that there’s actually a murderer stalking Sandford. The serial killer element of this film has its roots in a short Wright made in the early ‘90s, when he was still a teenager. Titled Dead Right, that short was about highly capable super-cops tracking a serial killer – who also happens to have an army of lackeys – in the small city of Wells in Somerset. Wright’s hometown. Which also happens to be where Hot Fuzz was filmed. Dead Right is much more absurd than Hot Fuzz, its serial killer is motivated by an intense love for cereal, but you can see the origins of the story in there. It you want to check it out, it has been included with physical media releases of Hot Fuzz and is also available online.
Feeding into the decision to make this a serial killer story is the fact that Wright and Pegg are both fans of splatter. They figured that having bloody murder scenes might also please genre fans who were following them over from Shaun of the Dead. So we get decapitations, a throat stabbing, a corpse burnt to a crisp, and – most impressive of all – a head crushed by a falling church spire. The sort of things you hope to see when you go to a horror movie. There’s also a cringe-inducing special effect where we see that even the spires on a miniature church can be extremely dangerous. A character gets one stuck through the bottom of their chin and it comes out their mouth. This doesn’t kill them; they’re just stuck there, in pain and wanting ice cream.
The other officers in Sandford brush off Angel’s homicide theory, accepting the deaths as accidents. But he has one ally on the force: Frost’s character, Police Constable Danny Butterman. A character Frost reportedly named himself. Danny is the son of the police force’s head Inspector Frank Butterman, and when Angel first shows up in town Danny is rather dopey and inexperienced. But he’s also a massive fan of cop action movies; he has a large DVD collection, with his top recommendations being Point Break and Bad Boys II. When he hears that Angel actually saw some action on the job while working in London, he becomes fascinated. He wants to know all about it – and to find out if Angel’s life has been just like the movies.
An excellent cast was assembled around Pegg and Frost. Jim Broadbent had enjoyed Shaun of the Dead so much that he asked to have a part in Wright’s next project. So he was cast as Frank Butterman. The character of supermarket manager Simon Skinner, the prime suspect in the murder investigation, was envisioned as being as a Timothy Dalton type… and then they found out they could actually get Timothy Dalton to play the role. Members of the Sandford police force are played by Paddy Considine, Rafe Spall, Bill Bailey, Kevin Eldon, Karl Johnson, and Olivia Colman. There is a touch of The Wicker Man to the overall story, and The Wicker Man star Edward Woodward was cast the head of the NWA. The Neighbourhood Watch Alliance. There are also appearances by the likes of Bill Nighy, Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan, Stephen Merchant, Lucy Punch, Paul Freeman, Cate Blanchett, and Peter Jackson. David Bradley plays that farmer with an unintelligible way of speaking, who has a stash of weapons. Including a sea mine. Those weapons will prove to be very handy toward the end of the film. Rory McCann, best known for playing Sandor Clegane “The Hound” on Game of Thrones, makes an impression in his role as a hulking character called Lurch, who also communicates in his own special way.
Now that you’ve heard all about Hot Fuzz, if you’re still wondering what the title means… well, the answer is, not much. They just wanted to give the movie a two-word title along the lines of Lethal Weapon and Point Break. “Fuzz” is a derogatory slang word for police and the rock band the Killers had just released an album called Hot Fuss, so Hot Fuzz seemed to be a good title for a cop movie.
REVIEW: Like Shaun of the Dead before it, Hot Fuzz is a very clever and entertaining blend of genres, with an obvious respect and even reverence for the movies that Wright and Pegg turned to for inspiration. The amount of time they put into perfecting the script is clear in the amount of set-up and payoff there is in the movie. There aren’t any wasted moments or lines, everything is building toward something. It all has a purpose, from the recurring gag of the escaped swan to the way Danny’s questions to Angel, based on things he’s seen in action movies, play into the climactic action sequence.
The movie does take its time getting to the sort of action Danny is so intrigued by. There are moments of excitement to be found in the first three quarters; murders and chases. But the bullets don’t really start flying until about ninety minutes into the film’s two hours. It’s worth the wait when the comedic mystery makes way for the spectacle. There’s a whole lot of gunfire and property damage, a vehicular chase, some fisticuffs. They may be solving a serial killer case, but Angel, Danny Butterman, and the fellow officers they convince to help them out have plenty of villains to take on in the end. Wright only had a budget somewhere in the range of fifteen million dollars to make this movie, but he still managed to shoot some great action with that amount of money. Sure, it’s no Bad Boys II, but what is? Only Bad Boys II.
While interviewing real police officers, Wright and Pegg were told that paperwork is a huge part of the job. It’s also something you don’t see much of in cop movies. So they made sure to include moments of officers doing paperwork in their film, with Wright shooting and cutting in them in a way that turns them into action scenes as well. The quick cuts in the paperwork sequences are an Edgar Wright trademark, but they’re stylized in a way that was meant to make them look like something out of a later Tony Scott movie. For example, Scott’s 2005 film DOMINO, which Wright was a fan of.
Pegg and Frost continue to have fantastic chemistry in this film, and the interactions between Angel and Danny were incredibly well written. You can really see these characters coming to care for each other. Neither one of them has a love interest on the side, the story is entirely dedicated to their blossoming bromance.
As expected, given the caliber of the actors involved, the supporting cast also did great work bringing their characters to life. Timothy Dalton, sporting a mustache he didn’t really want to grow, practically oozes slime in some scenes, his character is so unlikeable. When Angel makes an insulting gesture toward the former James Bond, the viewer is in full agreement. Dalton’s character first introduces himself as a slasher – a joke about how low the prices are at his supermarket. His discounts are criminal. But remember what we said about this movie having such great set-up and payoff, with no wasted lines.
LEGACY/NOW: Hot Fuzz is in the middle installment in what is called the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, or the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy. Shaun of the Dead started it off, and The World’s End wrapped it up several years later. Each were directed by Wright from a script he wrote with Pegg. Each stars Pegg and Frost. And each is a different style of movie. A zombie movie, a cop movie, and an alien invasion movie. They have their similarities, but they’re each as different from each other as three different flavors of the Cornetto ice cream featured in them. Shaun of the Dead was a breakthrough for Wright and Pegg, but it actually made the least at the box office. It had a global haul of thirty million. But since it was made on a budget of six million, it was more successful than The World’s End, which made forty-six million on a budget of twenty million.
Shaun of the Dead seems to be the most popular of the three films to do this day, but there’s no question that Hot Fuzz was the most successful entry in the trilogy during its initial theatrical run. This one made eighty million at the global box office. More success followed on DVD, when over one million copies were sold during its first four weeks of release in the UK. Almost two million copies were sold in the US. That two-disc set was packed with bonus features, perhaps most notably a commentary with Wright and his friend Quentin Tarantino, where they pack in references to nearly two hundred different movies during their conversation.
Well-reviewed, Hot Fuzz would also go on to land at number fifty on Empire magazine’s list of the one hundred best British movies of all time. It has a solid fan following, and fifteen years after its release it still holds up as a fine way to spend two hours. According to Pegg, the moral of Hot Fuzz is that it’s sometimes okay to switch off your brain and relax. If you need to switch off your brain and relax today, kicking back and putting on Hot Fuzz can help you do just that.
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