Hot Fuzz

A policeman strides down a precinct corridor. He’s got the steely glare of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, the square-jaw intensity of Bruce Willis’s John McClane and the maverick streak of Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs. We’ve seen enough blockbusters that even before our hero’s name is uttered—they call him … Nicholas Angel!—we know we’re dealing with a law-enforcement lone wolf. Angel is the most dedicated member of London’s Metropolitan Police. In fact, with an arrest rate “400 percent higher” than the rest of his department, he’s making everybody else look bad, which is why this supercop just got shuffled off to a quaint English village where a high-speed pursuit means chasing a runaway pet swan.

Welcome to Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz, which aims to do for high-octane action movies what his parodic masterpiece Shaun of the Dead did for zombie flicks. The setup is so simple even a studio executive would get it: Angel (Shaun star and cowriter Simon Pegg, who also shares writing duties here) is stuck in a town full of rural stereotypes (a kindly clergyman, cheery innkeepers) and saddled with a dim-bulb constable (Nick Frost) for a sidekick. Then a lot of mysterious “accidents” start occurring, and our hero smells a murder spree. (Things end up not being what they seem.) Oversize and extremely phallic guns are drawn. Things go boom. And, amid all the laughter, ’80s he-man cinema gets slowly roasted over a spit.

Any half-wit can parody a genre or two—or a dozen; just ask the cretins behind cut-rate gagfests like Epic Movie. But what makes Wright & Co.’s buddy-cop goof so spot-on is that, like their previous take on splatter flicks, the pair share an affection for—and thorough knowledge of—cineplex cheese with their film-geek fan base. It’s one thing to give the local homicide detective an outrageously bushy mustache (though, to be fair, actor Paddy Considine’s upper-lip shrubbery deserves some sort of tonsorial award); it’s another thing entirely to treat flash-cut montages of doors being opened and pub pints being pulled as if they were action sequences, or to turn a supermarket siege into a spot-on homage to John Woo’s bullet ballets. The fact that all of this Sturm und Drang is taking place in a picturesque hamlet only makes the inherent silliness of law-and-order summer-movie spectacles more apparent.

And yet, because Wright and Pegg still harbor a soft spot for Riggs and Murtaugh et al, they take the piss out of them without being condescending. The sheer glee with which they present these high-testosterone misadventures seems to say that yes, guys jumping over car hoods while firing two Glocks at once is so over the top that you can’t take it seriously. But we still get a huge rush watching.

Those viewers who prefer their testosterone in kinder, gentler doses may want to check out Diggers, a pleasant-enough indie about immature dudes belatedly coming of age. In this case, it’s a bunch of Long Island clam fishermen figuring things out in the mid-’70s (which means plentiful sideburns). But the character types are essentially timeless: There’s the go-with-the-flow guy (Paul Rudd), who gets an existential wakeup call when his pop dies; the local Lothario (Ron Eldard); the stoner philosopher (Josh Hamilton); and the blue-collar a-hole­ (The State’s Ken Marino). Various women, naturally, orbit these overgrown boys of summer as they stand around and talk. And talk. And talk. Director Katherine Dieckmann keeps everything moving smoothly, and the appeal of Rudd in wisecracking mode can’t be underestimated. But if you’ve ever sat through an Ed Burns film, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.

That’s something that certainly can’t be said for Zoo, a documentary about a Seattle resident who in the summer of 2005 went to see a man about a horse. He ended up bleeding to death in an emergency room several hours later from a perforated colon, and filmmaker Robinson Devor (Police Beat) traces the link between the two events. Yes, unfortunately, it’s exactly what you think—the victim was visiting a farm that catered to hot man-on-stallion action. A former crime reporter, Devor is skilled at getting people involved in the underground “zoophile” community to open up about their unusual lifestyle. What’s most surprising, however, is how he’s able to make a film about such a sensationalistic subject and have it be neither unbearably sleazy nor cringe-inducing. Thanks to the dreamlike cinematography and ambient soundtrack, the movie feels like a lyrical meditation on twisted desires (though it doesn’t condone them). As good as it is, this is one movie you hope to God never gets a sequel.