London Metropolitan Police Sergeant Nicholas Angel is having a bad day. Not on paper; he just got promoted, just got a “Good Luck Nicholas!” party thrown by his colleagues, just got relocated to the picturesque village of Sandford. But in practice, this is a forced retirement—a banishment of the most successful cop in London so he’ll stop making the rest of the force look so ineffectual by comparison. That point is plainly laid out in Hot Fuzz’s extended intro, but its emotional reality is underscored by an elegant, barely-thirty-second montage that wordlessly paints Nicholas’ feelings about the situation as clear as day.
If that doesn’t sound like a set-up for one of the funniest comedies of the century, that’s because it’s not––or not just. The issue with comedies, and particularly comedy-as-comfort movies, is that they’re particularly susceptible to diminishing returns. Comedy relies on eliciting physiological reactions from viewers (heads thrown back, knees slapped, bodies doubled over in laughter) that can’t help but wane on repeat viewings. Like a favorite song, the first few repeats might feel the upswing of knowing the words, your memory arriving at the punchlines in sync with the movie; then a beat before; then, eventually, early enough for their impact to dissipate. If a comedy misses the narrow window of becoming an endlessly quotable classic, it risks being relegated to an eternal bargain bin.
Devoid of the rich emotional landscape of dramas (or worse, swinging too hard to reclaim that emotionality, resulting in overlong and too-serious third acts), there isn’t always enough there there once the jokes have lost their punch. That’s where Edgar Wright comes in. How do you retain that pleasurable physicality and help the audience feel it even when they stop feeling it? Simple: you make something so crisp and tight and tactile that they can almost reach out and touch it. Even if your laughter dies out by the third or fourth watch, you can still feel the crunch of the sound design, the snap of the editing, the satisfying click of a plot locking into place.
The best of Wright’s cinema all share this quality of embodied presence, leaving us with something to hold onto beyond fleeting chuckles—something with near-physical heft that makes us feel like we got our money’s worth. And Hot Fuzz (2007), for my money, is the best of the best of Wright’s cinema, leveraging every perfect match-cut and hilariously blocked visual gag to create something lastingly comforting. In relying on every tool in his maximalist bag, Wright builds something more than just a comedy: a sweet brom-com, a quaint whodunit, a campy slasher, yes, yes, yes. But also a dimensional, intricate object, the very design of which is alive and overflowing with care.
***
There’s an old joke that the Academy Award for Best Editing often honors the movie with the most editing. By that measure, Hot Fuzz should have the award named after it. Which might read like a slight, because for most movies, it would be. But right from its hyperactive opening minutes, Hot Fuzz loads its shotgun with so many audiovisual styles and techniques that the resulting blast, if scattered, can’t help but make a hell of an impact. Wright and his editor Chris Dickens employ whip pans, match cuts, flash cuts, superimpositions, rapid zooms, instant replays, cutaway gags, fades to black, montages, montages, montages, slasher jump cuts, flashbacks, shaky cams, noir lighting, cross-fades, Michael Bay-esque rotating shots, Michael Bay-esque helicopter shots, Michael Bay-esque car-mounted shots, slo-mo, fast-mo, micro-montages, macro-montages, and montages. It should be way too much, and yet this kitchen-sink approach has a sort of cheeky throughline to it, allowing a variety of styles to accrete into one distinct super-style.
This ethos extends to the film’s relationship to genre in general, as it smoothly morphs into whatever a particular scene calls for: a comedy, a western, a horror; sometimes a knowing satire of action movies, other times just a knowing action movie. Again, this could so easily tip into the realm of excess, but it all holds together because it’s never lazily or loosely done. Whether crafting an explosive 30-minute finale or a three-second insert shot punchline, Wright pours his considerable technical skill and his encyclopedic knowledge of high- and low-brow cinema into every artisan frame.
Take that aforementioned travel montage, when Nicholas first leaves London for Sandford. Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting has a terrific video essay that breaks down the scene in detail as an exemplar of Wright’s broader visual comedy, but in short: Wright takes a transition that could’ve been covered with a simple wide shot of a train (or even just a title card) and instead turns it into a mini-feast of emotional exposition. Using insert shots of taxi signs and a phone with dwindling service, cleverly jump-cut footage of the many trains and cars Nicholas has to take on his journey, and ominously fading shots of the approaching village, Wright sneaks in some laughs while also telling us a surprising amount about Nicholas’s relationship to Sandford, and Sandford’s relationship to London.
Or perhaps a simpler example: when Nicholas introduces himself as the new Police Sergeant to Joyce (Billie Whitelaw), Sandford’s innkeeper, she abruptly replies, “Fascist.” Nicholas begs her pardon, and she says, “System of government characterized by extreme dictatorship, 7 across,” motioning to the crossword she’s doing. It’s a good Mel Brooksian joke, made better when Nicholas returns the favor and calls Joyce a “hag.” (Evil old woman considered ugly or frightful, 12 down.) Lest any comedic potential go unspent, we get a great capper on this exchange in the film’s finale, when Nicholas and Joyce meet under more combative circumstances and lob these same crossword clues back at each other, this time as actual insults. It’s fitting that the crux of these laughs is a crossword puzzle, an apt metaphor for the satisfying, multipurpose way Wright lines up his jokes.
Both of these examples, big and small, are emblematic of the larger reason Hot Fuzz is able to present as something solid and sinewed: so many of the cuts and transitions happen virtually in-frame—someone walks in front of camera, a car drives by, a phone key is punched, a camera flashes—and everything is so precisely blocked and timed that the tools of the filmmaker fuse with the film itself, all a part of the same world, the same continuous texture. In other words, everything is both diegetic and not; Wright doesn’t see the grammar of filmmaking as just a means to an end, but as an orchestra of instruments capable of making their own beautiful, hilarious music.
That expansive cinematic worldview opens up all kinds of new avenues for humor. Why should a comedy be reliant on dialogue when a well-timed cut can just as easily land a joke? When Nicholas receives a call about the killers’ first murder, we only hear his side of the conversation—”Decaffeinated?!”—before a deadly jump cut puts us eye-to-eye with the decapitated heads of the victims. Like his fellow dioramatic stylist of precise gags, Wes Anderson, Wright uses cuts and blocking as punchlines. Lines (or even stage directions) that can’t have been funny on the page get laughs through the rhythm of their form. Take this sequence from the Hot Fuzz script, where Nicholas, reluctant to pick up any kind of weapon again after his violent tenure in London, is goaded into playing a carnival air rifle game by Danny:
NICHOLAS grudgingly takes an air rifle. DANNY smiles expectantly. NICHOLAS fires, hitting every can dead centre with amazing speed. He lowers the rifle, feeling excited and unclean at once.
This unremarkable bit of action is given vivid life by Wright’s camera: in a rapid sequence of shots, we see Nicholas cocking the air rifle, then the six targets getting knocked down (dramatized by axial cuts punching in on the targets), then Nicholas uncocking the air rifle. This takes four seconds, telling us more in a blip of screentime than a thirty-second monologue about Nicholas’ past ever could have—and looking great while doing it.
And sounding great while doing it, too. Another crucial ingredient to Wright’s secret sauce is the sound design, which is as crisp and tight as the editing because, like everything else in his films, it’s stitched into the very fabric of the cut. This air rifle montage is accompanied by some of the clearest, crunchiest gun-loading sounds ever captured on mic, just one small example of the work for which Foley artists Peter Burgis and Andie Derrick should’ve received the sound equivalent of the Pulitzer.
Nearly every one of Hot Fuzz’s multitudinous editing tricks and techniques is aurally matched by a sound amplifying its effect. So when a cut is synced to a keypad-punch or a pen-click, it’s also cued with the most turned-to-11 version of those sounds imaginable. And when we see a wipe transition triggered by a car or a person running across the camera, we hear an accompanying siren or WHOOOOOSH that gives the movie’s sound the same momentum as its visuals. Once again, Wright plays with the permeable membrane of his form; these sound effects function simultaneously as diegetic noise and as a sort of non-diegetic auditory cut, like a cinematic version of a comic book’s vibrant onomatopoeia.
Hot Fuzz’s playful exploitation of sound extends beyond virtuosic Foley work. Elsewhere, Wright tinkers with noise in other ways, using hyperbolic sound effects as jokes in and of themselves. During both the hilarious montage of Nicholas and Danny uncovering a farmer’s secret military-grade arsenal and the film’s drawn-out shoot-out finale, there are approximately five times more gun-cocking sounds than guns on-screen. (Like so much of Hot Fuzz’s satire, this effect works as both a spoof of over-the-top action movies and as a fun iteration of them, having its cake and satirizing it too.)
During that same shootout, when Nicholas is sizing up his options in a bar standoff, his visual realization of a shootable chandelier is paired with video game beeps, as if he just solved a puzzle in The Legend of Zelda—a stylistic foreshadowing of Wright’s more overtly video-game-influenced Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010). When Nicholas mounts up and rides into town for the final confrontation as the hero on a white horse, the musical cues practically act as audio tumbleweeds, calling back to Wright’s lo-fi western parody, A Fistful of Fingers (1995). And when our protagonists jump into their police car and dramatically buckle in and stomp the pedal in perfect sync with Nicholas saying “Punch. That. Shit,” it’s hard not to think of the action-synced-to-song selling point of Baby Driver (2017).
The dialogue makes just as strong an impression as the musical cues and sound effects. The words here, written by Wright and Simon Pegg (same as Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, the other anthology entries in the so-called “Cornetto Trilogy”) are as witty as they are surprisingly heartfelt, and like everything else about the film, Wright gives them double duty as both dialogue and—what else?—editing tools. Whether in the repeated bits of dialogue (“The greater good,” “crusty jugglers,” “No luck catching them killers?”) that act as both thematic lodestars and hidden clues to the killers’ identity, or in the overlapping audio in the many revealing flashbacks, Wright uses words like he uses images: as delivery mechanisms for plot and jokes, sure, but also as pliable material for stylistic ornamentation.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than his use of dialogue to stylishly transition between scenes. Similar to the “decaffeinated?” editing gag, there are multiple other instances of Wright launching a joke with words in one scene only to land it with visuals in another. Someone says, “You’re pulling my leg,” so we cut to the killer dragging a victim by the leg. Or someone else says, “This is about to go off,” so we cut to a house exploding. Besides getting laughs, these verbal match cuts almost function as acts of conjuring—someone says something, then it appears—that underscore the power of words in Wright’s world.
These magic-word transitions contribute to the same cohesive effect as the in-camera wipes or perfectly synced edits, drawing a thread through the film’s disparate parts. It’s chaotic, no doubt, but Wright conducts it all to order. His seeming mastery over every last aspect of the film’s world—the dialogue, the framing, the blocking, the sound—once again calls Wes Anderson to mind. Both directors create micro-universes where it feels like everything and everyone exists to further the comedy of their makers, walking and turning on cue, talking with an almost musical rhythm, dancing to an invisible choreography.
Rather than feeling manipulated, these clockwork worlds sing with purpose. There’s not a single shot that exists because it was the simplest way to get the coverage; each one has a POV, or is load-bearing for a joke, or is just fascinating or funny to look at. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and Hot Fuzz are very different movies, but Ralph Fiennes being symmetrically framed by inmates and guards and Simon Pegg being cheerfully surrounded by his colleagues are both funny in the same way.
While Wright hasn’t yet followed Anderson to the logical extreme of ordered filmmaking by directing an animated film, he nevertheless exhibits a cartoonist’s command of his worlds. To draw a very different comp, if Taiwanese master of realism Edward Yang’s films look as if the natural world bent and leaned in just to be inhaled by his painterly camera, then Anderson and Wright have a similar but inverted gift: their cameras seem to exhale new worlds out of whole cloth.
The Judd Apatowian style of letting gifted comedians riff and improv until something sticks has yielded plenty of great movies. But it’s nice, sometimes, to watch something that is formally committed to comedy—even while proving that formalism isn’t mutually exclusive with a sense of humor in the lineage of Looney Tunes and the Zucker brothers. That latter name is especially instructive to the hard-earned joy of Wright’s cinema; by opting for Texas Switches and other admirably efforted hijinks in lieu of CGI fake-outs, Wright earns the comparison to The Naked Gun’s most elaborate set-ups. Few have ever worked so hard to have so much fun, and we just get to reap.
***
It’s notable but nonpejorative that we’ve gotten this far without really delving into Hot Fuzz’s plot or performances, either of which could merit its own essay-long breakdown. Their sublimation in this piece is simply another articulation of its thesis: namely, that the movie’s technical elements hold equal status with its story and cast, with each cog—even the stars—knowing their role in contributing to The Greater Good.
That’s reflected in the actors’ commitment to hitting their marks, both literal and tonal, with the inch-precision Wright’s exacting comedy demands. Ditto the way the chameleonic story shapeshifts to match, trying on multiple genres while fulfilling all the plot-mechanical needs of its whodunit superstructure (with aplomb). But don’t let all the order fool you; the performances and the plot may be controlled, but like Anderson, Wright proves that control doesn’t preclude heart.
As Nicholas investigates the village’s increasingly suspicious deaths, the plot plays at first like a comfortingly predictable Scooby-Doo-for-adults mystery. The killer is obviously Timothy Dalton’s store owner, Simon, whose surname is Skinner and whose first spoken line is “Lock me up… I’m a slasher and I must be stopped!” This reveal hits its mark like all the others before an appropriately over-the-top denouement pulls the curtain back on a wider conspiracy involving all of the village’s old guard. It turns out even murder can be justified under the cultish banner of “The Greater Good,” which in this case ends up meaning a laughably provincial “Village of the Year” award.
Even this Murder on the Orient Express-style, “it was all the suspects… together!” reveal lands less like a true shock and more like a ball running in its track to a satisfyingly preordained endpoint. After all, there’s not much of a difference between a mystery’s clues and a comedy’s callbacks, and Wright’s mystery-comedy is scattered with plenty of each—just another way of making everything feel like a piece of a perfect object, where every punchline (comedic or narrative, goofy or clever) hits harder because even the most outlandish ones fall within the engineering tolerance of the film’s intricate design.
In the eye of this punchline hurricane is the buddy-cop duo of Danny and Nicholas, who gradually, sweetly meet each other in the middle. The key to their relationship—and the skeleton key to Wright’s larger pathos—lies in a brief pub exchange about halfway through the movie, after Danny finally gets Nicholas to order something stronger than a cranberry juice:
NICHOLAS: What about you, what made you want to become a police officer?
DANNY: I dunno. Dad does it… I think after my Mum died, it’s what he wanted, you know? Keep me close by.
NICHOLAS: Do you mind if I ask how she died?
DANNY: Traffic collision.
NICHOLAS: I’m sorry.
DANNY: Nevermind…hey, watch this!
DANNY sticks a fork in his eye, scarlet squirts everywhere.
NICHOLAS: Jesus Christ?
DANNY: Ta-daaaa!
DANNY reveals a TOMATO KETCHUP sachet. NICHOLAS laughs.
Simply reading this exchange, you don’t get the benefit of Pegg’s and Frost’s brotherly warmth, hard-won across years of friendship and films. But with just one scene, and really with just two words—”Traffic collision”—they give us everything we need.
Beyond offering some tragic insight into Danny’s arrested development, his formal phrasing here demonstrates that he is trying to be a better cop, and that Nicholas’s seriousness is rubbing off on him; just a couple of scenes earlier, Nicholas had corrected Danny’s terminology around “traffic accidents.” Frost does a lot with his line reading here, letting our sympathy (and Nicholas’s) linger for a moment before pivoting hard to prop comedy—a tonal shift that sets up the ketchup trick that Danny will later use to save Nicholas’s life, while also showcasing how Danny’s joie de vivre is helping Nicholas learn to “switch off that big ol’ melon of [his.]”
That’s a lot of water for one joke to carry. It’s economical, funny, touching, and tight; simply, it’s Wright in a bottle. Which itself is a perfect mixed metaphor for the maximalist bounty he was somehow able to fit into this miniature masterpiece, building something tactile enough to serve as the cinematic equivalent of a fidget cube, but with none of the reductiveness that implies.
Hot Fuzz is more like a Fabergé fidget cube, full of heart, its many, many contraptions and bells and whistles held together by so much humor and whimsy and craft as to be almost deliriously entertaining. If I could carry it around in my pocket, I would. Maybe the laughs, even buoyed as they are by Wright’s artistic care, would eventually fade. Big maybe. But even then, how could I complain? I’d be the first person in the world to never be bored again.