Hot Fuzz | 2007 | Advance | UK Quad

Hot Fuzz is a 2007 satirical action comedy film directed by Edgar Wright and produced by Nira Park, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. The screenplay written by Wright and Simon Pegg with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton starring. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost along with the film’s producer Nira Park had previously worked together on the television series Spaced and the film Shaun of the Dead released in 2004.

The storyline follows top London cop, PC Nicholas Angel who is good actually too good and in order to stop the rest of his team looking bad, he is reassigned to the quiet town of Sandford, a fictional small English village. Here he is partnered with Danny Butterman, who endlessly questions him on his action lifestyle. Everything seems quiet and mundane for Angel, until two of the towns residents are found decapitated. It is called an accident, but Angel isn’t going to accept that, especially when more and more people turn up dead. Angel and Danny clash with everyone, whilst trying to uncover the truth behind the mystery of the apparent “accidents”.

Edgar Wright had wanted to write and direct a cop film because “there isn’t really any tradition of cop films in the UK… We felt that every other country in the world had its own tradition of great cop action films and we had none”. Wright and Simon Pegg spent eighteen months writing the script with the first draft taking eight months to develop, and after watching 138 cop-related films for dialogue and plot ideas, they conducted over fifty interviews with police officers for research. The script was finally completed nine months after.

Hot Fuzz is the second in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy and was preceded by Shaun of the Dead and followed by The World’s End, with each of them featuring a different flavour of Cornetto ice cream.

When Hot Fuzz was released it received high acclaim from the critics and audiences alike. On Rotten Tomatoes it currently holds a rating of 91% with the general consensus being, “The brilliant minds behind Shaun of the Dead successfully take a shot at the buddy cop genre with Hot Fuzz. The result is a bitingly satiric and hugely entertaining parody”. Despite being mostly praised, not all the reviews were positive. The Daily Mirror gave Hot Fuzz only 2/5, saying that “many of the jokes miss their target” as the film becomes more action-based. However, in 2016, Empire ranked Hot Fuzz 50th on their list of the 100 best British films, stating, “the second in their planned trilogy again nails the genre clichés, with everything from Point Break to Bad Boys II (both openly referenced) humorously homaged. Pegg’s natural chemistry with long-time real-life pal Frost remains endearing as ever. Elsewhere, the Scooby-Doo-meets-Scream mystery is peppered with Britain’s finest talent, playing up the English small-town clichés to great effect in a brilliantly incongruous meeting of sleepy rural life and stabby violent action”.

Commercially, Hot Fuzz was hugely successful. Produced with an estimated production budget of £8 million ($12 million), it went on to take $11,536,353 in its opening weekend in the UK and totalled $41,210,622 in UK box office receipts. When it opened at the US box office it took $5,837,000 and went on to take $23,637,265 in gross US box office receipts. Worldwide box office receipts totalled £63,122,665 ($80,743,363) making it the most financially successful film in the trilogy.

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