Hot Fuzz | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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Directed by | Edgar Wright |
Produced by | Nira Park Tim Bevan Eric Fellner |
Written by | Edgar Wright Simon Pegg |
Starring | Simon Pegg Nick Frost Jim Broadbent Timothy Dalton Paddy Considine Edward Woodward Billie Whitelaw |
Music by | David Arnold |
Cinematography | Jess Hall |
Editing by | Chris Dickens |
Studio | StudioCanal Working Title Films Big Talk Productions |
Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date(s) | February 14, 2007 (UK) April 20, 2007 |
Running time | 121 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom France |
Language | English |
Budget | £8 million[1][2] |
Gross revenue | $80,573,774 |
Preceded by | Shaun of the Dead |
Followed by | The World's End |
Hot Fuzz is a 2007 British action comedy film written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The three had previously worked together on the 2004 film Shaun of the Dead as well as the television series Spaced. The film was directed by Wright and produced by Nira Park, and follows two police officers attempting to solve a series of mysterious deaths in a small village.
Over a hundred action films were used as inspiration for developing the script, which Wright and Pegg worked on together. Filming took place over eleven weeks in early 2006, and featured an extensive cast along with various uncredited cameos. Visual effects were developed by ten artists to expand on or add explosive, gore, and gunfire scenes. Prior to the film's release it was promoted on video blogs during the production as well as at a San Diego Comic-Con panel.
Debuting on February 14, 2007 in the United Kingdom and April 20 in the United States, Hot Fuzz received universal acclaim with a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 81/100 from Metacritic. The total international box office gross reached $80,573,774 before its home media release. Shortly after the film's release, two different soundtracks were released in the UK and US. The film is the second in Wright, Pegg, and Frost's Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, with Shaun of the Dead being the first, and The World's End as the third.
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Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), an extremely dedicated police officer in London's Metropolitan Police Service, performs his duties so well that he is accused of making his colleagues look bad. As a result, his superiors promote and transfer him to crime-free Sandford, a village in rural Gloucestershire. Once there, he immediately arrests a large group of underage drinkers, and a drunk driver who turns out to be his partner, Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the son of local police inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent). Danny, a well-meaning but naive police constable, is in awe of his new partner. Angel struggles to adjust to the slow, uneventful pace of the village. Despite clearing up several otherwise unnoticed crimes in short order, including confiscating a naval mine and a large number of unlicensed firearms, Angel soon finds his most pressing concern to be an escaped swan. His attention to the letter of the law also makes him the focus of dislike by some of his co-workers. Angel and Danny eventually bond over drinks at the local pub and action films, Point Break and Bad Boys II.
A series of gruesome deaths rock the village and all are labelled as accidents. Angel, believing the deaths to be murders, begins to investigate. He attempts to arrest Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton), the manager of the local Somerfield supermarket, under suspicion of murdering the victims due to their involvement in a lucrative property deal. Skinner is able to provide plausible explanations for all of Angel's charges, and a videotape of himself working at his supermarket while the murders took place.
When Angel returns to his hotel room, he is attacked by a cloaked figure. He knocks the attacker unconscious, discovering it is the trolley boy at Skinner's supermarket, sent by Skinner to kill Angel. Angel heads to a nearby castle where he discovers the truth: Skinner, Inspector Butterman, and the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance (NWA), intent on keeping Sandford's title of "Village of the Year", have been murdering anyone who they saw as a threat to the village's charming image, and the property deal Angel discovered was actually just a coincidence. Inspector Butterman reveals that his wife committed suicide after the village lost the title many years ago, motivating him to use extreme methods. Angel discovers the bodies of various "problem" people whom the NWA disposed of, before being cornered and 'stabbed' by Danny, apparently a member of the NWA.
Having tricked the NWA into believing that Angel is dead, Danny drives him to the village limits and releases him, insisting that he knew nothing about their true activities. Danny urges Angel to go back to London, reasoning that no one would believe the truth about Sandford. At a motorway service station, Angel sees Point Break and Bad Boys II on a nearby DVD rack and is inspired to stop the NWA. He drives back to town and arms himself with the firearms he confiscated earlier. After Angel meets with Danny in the village, the two begin to dispatch the members of the NWA in an increasingly destructive and frantic series of gun fights. Confronted by their colleagues, who are quickly persuaded of the truth, Angel and Danny take the battle to the supermarket. Skinner and Inspector Butterman flee, and are pursued by Angel and Danny to a nearby miniature park. There, Angel battles Skinner, who accidentally impales his jaw on the spire of the miniature cathedral. Inspector Butterman attempts to escape in a car, but crashes into a tree when the swan Angel caught attacks him from the back seat.
Angel's former superiors arrive from London, begging him to return, as the crime rate has risen dramatically without him, but Angel chooses to remain in Sandford. Back at the police station, Tom Weaver, the last remaining member of the NWA, attempts to shoot Angel, but Danny shields Angel and takes the shot. Angel returns fire, and in the resulting chaos, Weaver falls onto the confiscated sea mine triggering it and destroying the station.
The film fast-forwards one year later and Angel lays flowers on a grave marked 'Butterman'; it is revealed that Danny has survived and the grave is his mother's. Danny is now a sergeant and Angel the head of the Sandford Police Service, and the two head off to patrol Sandford.
While writing the script, the film's director and writer, Edgar Wright, as well as Simon Pegg, intended to include Nick Frost as the partner for Pegg's character. Frost revealed that he would only do the film if he could name his character, and he chose "Danny Butterman".[3] Cast requirements included fifty people for speaking and non-speaking parts, and there were several casting calls for citizens of Wells to fill the roles, as the city was where most of the filming took place.[3]
Wright decided that he 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."[7] Wright and Simon Pegg spent eighteen months writing the script.[8] The first draft took eight months to develop, and after watching 138 cop-related films for dialogue and plot ideas and conducting over fifty interviews with police officers for research, the script was completed after another nine months.[5][8] The title was based on the various two-word titles of action films in the 1980s and 90s.[9] In one interview Wright declared that he "wanted to make a title that really had very little meaning...like Lethal Weapon and Point Break and Executive Decision." In the same interview, Pegg joked that when the many action films' titles were chosen that "...all those titles seem to be generated from two hats filled with adjectives and nouns and you just, ‘Okay, that'll do.’"[9] Pegg and Wright have referred to Hot Fuzz as being the second film in their "Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy" with Shaun of the Dead as the first and the future project The World's End as the third.[10][11]
To prepare for their roles in the film, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost had to follow certain requirements. Pegg's contract stated that he had to adopt a strict diet and use three personal trainers to prepare him for the physically demanding scenes in the film. Frost was asked by Wright and Pegg to watch around twenty action films to warm him up for his role as a police officer, but he decided to only watch Bad Boys II.[12]
During the latter half of 2005, Working Title approached several towns in South West England looking for an appropriate filming location. Simon Pegg commented "We're both from the West Country so it just seemed like it was the perfect and logical thing to drag those kind of ideas and those genres and those clichés back to our beginnings to where we grew up, so you could see high-octane balls-to-the-wall action in Frome".[13] Stow-on-the-Wold was considered amongst others, but after being turned away, the company settled upon Wells, Wright's hometown.[14] Wright has commented "and Wells is very picturesque...I love it but I also want to trash it".[15] The Wells Cathedral was digitally painted out of every shot of the village, as Wright wanted the Church of St. Cuthbert to be the centre building for the fictional town of Sandford (Sandford is also the fictional town name used during National Police Training when any role-playing exercises are taking place);[6] however, the Bishop's Palace is identifiable in some shots.[16] Filming also took place at the Hendon Police College, including the driving school skid pan and athletic track.[17] Filming commenced on 19 March 2006 and lasted for eleven weeks.[18][19] After editing, Wright ended up cutting half an hour of footage from the film.[20]
Wright has said that Hot Fuzz takes elements from his final amateur film, Dead Right, which he described as both "Lethal Weapon set in Somerset" and "a Dirty Harry film in Somerset".[15] He uses some of the same locations in both films including the Somerfield supermarket, where he used to work as a shelf-stacker.[15] In the scene in the Somerfield store, when Angel is confronting a chav for shoplifting, a DVD copy of Shaun of the Dead can be seen for a few frames. The title is Zombies' Party, the Spanish and Portuguese title for the film.[21]
Various scenes in Hot Fuzz feature a variety of action film DVDs such as Supercop, and scenes from Point Break and Bad Boys II. Wright revealed that he had to get permission from every actor in each video clip, including stunt men, to use the clips and for the use of the DVD covers had to pay for the rights from the respective studios.[22] The film parodies clichés used in other action movies. On the topic of perceived gun fetishes in these movies, Pegg has said "Men can't do that thing, which is the greatest achievement of humankind, which is to make another human, so we make metal versions of our own penises and fire more bits of metal out of the end into people's heads...It's our turn to grab the gun by the hilt and fire it into your face."[13] Despite this, Pegg maintains that the film is not a spoof in that, "They lack the sneer that a lot of parodies have that look down on their source material. Because we're looking up to it."[23] The film also includes various references to The Wicker Man, in which Edward Woodward, here playing a major villain, had played a policeman tough on law and order.[24]
Ten artists were used to develop the visual effects for the film.[25] To illustrate the destruction of the mansion as a result of the gas explosion, gas mortars were placed in front of the building to create large-scale fireballs. The wave of fire engulfs the camera, and to achieve that effect, gas mortars were used again but were fired upwards into a black ceiling piece that sloped up towards the camera.[25] When the sequence was shot at a high speed the flames appeared to surge across the ground. For one of the final scenes of the film, the Sandford police station is destroyed by an explosion. Part of the explosion was created by using a set model that showed its windows being blown out, while the building remained intact. The actual destruction of the building was depicted by exploding a miniature model of the station.[6]
Similar to the work in Shaun of the Dead, blood and gore was prevalent throughout the film. Visual effects supervisor Richard Briscoe revealed the rationale for using the large amounts of blood: "In many ways, the more extreme you make it, the more people know it is stylised and enjoy the humour inherent in how ridiculous it is. It's rather like the (eventually) limbless Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail."[25] The most time-consuming gore sequence involved a character's head being crushed by a section of a church. A dummy was used against a green screen and the head was detonated at the point when the object was about to impact the body. Throughout the film, over seventy gunfight shots were digitally augmented; Briscoe's rationale for adding the additional effects was that "The town square shootout, for example, is full of extra little hits scattered throughout, so that it feels like our hero characters really do have it all going off, all around them. It was a great demonstration of [how] seemingly very trivial enhancements can make a difference when combined across a sequence."[25]
The first two teaser trailers were released on October 16, 2006. Wright, Pegg, and Frost maintained several video blogs which were released at various times throughout the production of the film.[26] Wright and Frost held a panel at the 2006 Comic-Con convention in San Diego, California to promote Hot Fuzz, which included preliminary footage and a question and answer session.[27] The two returned to the convention again in 2007 to promote the US DVD release.[28] Advanced screenings of the film took place on 14 February 2007 in the UK and the world premiere was on 16 February 2007. The premiere included escorts from motorcycle police officers and the use of blue carpet instead of the traditional red carpet.[29]
The film received highly positive reviews, and was rated as highly as Shaun of the Dead.[30] It has a 91% "Certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes[31] and has a Metacritic score of 81/100.[32] Olly Richards of Empire said of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost: "After almost a decade together they’re clearly so comfortable in each other’s presence that they feel no need to fight for the punchline, making them terrific company for two hours".[33] Johnny Vaughan of The Sun already called it the "most arresting Brit-com of 2007".[34] Phillip French of The Observer, who did not care for Shaun of the Dead, warmed to the comedy team in this film.[35] The film also received positive reviews stateside. Derek Elley of Variety praised Broadbent and Dalton, "[who] are especially good as Angel's hail-fellow-well-met superior and oily No. 1 suspect".[36] As a homage to the genre, the film was well received by screenwriter Shane Black.[20] On Spill.com, it got their 2nd-highest rating of 'Full Price!!'.
The Daily Mirror only gave Hot Fuzz 2/5, stating that "many of the jokes miss their target" as the film becomes more action-based.[37] Daily Mail also shared The Mirror's view, saying that "It's the lack of any serious intent that means too much of it is desperately unamusing, and unamusingly desperate".[38] Anthony Quinn of The Independent said "The same impish spirit [as Spaced] is uncorked here, but it has been fatally indulged".[39]
The film generated £7.1 million in its first weekend of release in the UK on February 14, 2007.[40] In the April 20 US opening weekend, the film grossed $5.8 million from only 825 theatres, making it the highest per-theatre average of any film in the top ten that week.[41] Its opening weekend take beat the $3.3 million opening weekend gross of Pegg and Wright's previous film, Shaun of the Dead. In its second weekend of release, Rogue Pictures expanded the film's theater count from 825 to 1,272 and it grossed $4.9 million, representing a 17% dip in the gross.[42] Altogether, Hot Fuzz grossed $80,573,774 worldwide.[41] In nine weeks, the film earned nearly twice what Shaun of the Dead made in the US, and more than three times its gross in other countries.[43]
The DVD was released on June 11, 2007 in the UK. Over one million DVDs were sold in the UK in the first four weeks of its release.[44] The two-disc set contains the feature film with commentaries, outtakes, storyboards, deleted scenes, a making-of documentary, video blogs, featurettes, galleries, and some hidden easter eggs. The DVD also features Wright's last amateur film, Dead Right, which he described as "Hot Fuzz without the budget". Due to the above release date, the film arrived on region 2 DVD earlier than the theatrical release date in Germany on June 14, 2007.[45] In the commentary with director Edgar Wright and fellow filmmaker Quentin Tarantino they discuss nearly 200 films.[46]
The US DVD and HD DVD release was on July 31, 2007. It opened at #2 at the American DVD sales chart, selling 853,000 units for over $14m in revenue. As per the latest figures,1,923,000 units have been sold, acquiring revenue of $33.3m.[47] The HD DVD edition has more special features than the standard DVD release. A three-disc collector's edition was released on November 27, 2007 and a Blu-ray edition on September 22, 2009.[48]
Hot Fuzz won Best Comedy Film at the National Movie Awards as well as Best Comedy Film at the Empire Awards. It also won Funniest Film at the LAFTAS. It was nominated for Best Comedy Film at the British Comedy Awards but lost to The Simpsons Movie.
The soundtrack album, Hot Fuzz: Music from the Motion Picture, was released on 19 February 2007 in the United Kingdom, and on 17 April 2007 in the United States and Canada. The UK release contains 22 tracks, and the North American release has 14. The film's score is by British composer David Arnold, who has scored the James Bond film series since 1997. The soundtrack album's "Hot Fuzz Suite" is a compilation of excerpts from Arnold's score.[49]
Other music from the film is a mix of 1960s and 1970s British rock (The Kinks, T.Rex, The Move, The Sweet, The Troggs, Arthur Brown, Cloud 69, Cozy Powell), New Wave (Adam Ant, XTC) and UK and American indie (The Fratellis, Eels).[49][50] The soundtrack album features dialogue extracts by Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and other cast members, mostly embedded in the music tracks.[51] The song selection also includes some police-themed titles, including Supergrass' "Caught by the Fuzz" as well as "Here Come the Fuzz", which was especially composed for the film by Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion.[6][49]
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