Hot Fuzz (2007)

Director: Edgar Wright

Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: I’ve always thought it was a fair bit less than Shaun of the Dead (2004), but that may be too quick of a judgment. For one thing, Timothy Dalton is in the movie, and I’ve long since stopped pretending that every movie he appears in isn’t great. Doubly so for any film in which (spoiler) he’s the bad guy. Yep, I’m counting both The Rocketeer (1991) and the 2009 Doctor Who Christmas special.

Maybe the film grew on me after I finally saw The Wicker Man (1973), because as much as this film owes a debt to movies like Point Blank (1991) and Bad Boys II (2003), it’s entire structure owes far more to that singularly British horror film. I think it has far more to do with the fact that it becomes far more resonant with American audiences not because it plays with the fundamental imagery and impulses of the Western, but more that the deep, evil at the core of Sandford is about preserving some kind of image that the Chamber of Commerce has for the town. It’s going to be a long, long time before anyone uses the syntax “Make (blank Great Again” and any American evolved beyond single-cells doesn’t laugh with derision. Doesn’t matter if the film pre-dates the dark times by a decade.

The most likely, answer, however, is that I really don’t want to make the kind of comparisons that rank trilogies—even loose ones—and series. Just because Shaun caught everyone by surprise, doesn't mean that Hot Fuzz is less. It still has pop culture awareness to spare, while still offering a dynamic enough story, the hallmark of Wright. It still has pitch-perfect performances by both Pegg and Frost. There’s nothing more one should try to expect from a film.

Paul (2011)

Director: Greg Mottola

Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman

Have I Seen It Before?: Certainly.

Did I like it?: It feels fundamentally unfair, but when Pegg and Frost headline a film, one can’t help but long for Edgar Wright to be at the helm of the film. They should be allowed to work on their own projects, right?

Also, I can’t help but feel that as Simon Pegg becomes more and more successful with mainstream audiences that his nerd credibility has also become diminished.

But to judge the film on its actual merits, and not some artificial sense of its context among other films…

To its credit, the special effects are pretty subtly great. Nearly ten years after the release, Paul (voiced by Rogen) remains a fairly believable CGI creature. That’s no small feat. Greg Mottola is fine as director, and the whole film works as an innocuous comedy. And yet, the whole film never quite launches past the orbit of other American films of the last fifteen years or so (call it the Apatow era, if that helps). It also trucks in dread “reference rumor,” that same style of writing that fueled “The Big Bang Theory” through 912 seasons. Here it is supposed to be enough that much of the film takes place at Sand Diego ComicCon, but the context of why we appreciate the things celebrated there isn’t quite there. Somebody like Edgar Wright would have made one of the best close encounter movies of all time, and it would be thoroughly amusing as something of an afterthought.

I guess I did manage to find a way to bring the specter of Edgar Wright back into this review. I guess I’m still irate that he was chased off of Ant-Man (2015) is all.

But, again, that doesn’t really talk about this film, does it? The script came from Simon Pegg (and Frost), who wrote those superlative Cornetto films, you’d think something would leak in, but it again, remains just a comedy. Had Pegg and Frost not been in the film at all, I probably wouldn’t be thinking along these lines at all.