If you’ve never seen Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007), you could think of it as a British Naked Gun (1988), twenty years on. They’re both spoofs of cop movies, but in the interim, the genre pivoted from hard-boiled procedurals to testosterone-fueled, explosion-filled bromances, the ur-texts being Lethal Weapon and Bad Boys.
There are plentiful allusions to both those series in Hot Fuzz, as well as to Mad Max; Man on Fire; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; True Lies; Taxi Driver; and Chinatown. A somewhat subtle reference to the last comes in some dialogue between obsessive London cop Nick Angel (cowriter Simon Pegg), who has been transferred to the picturesque town of Sandford because he’s just too damned good at his job, and his bumbling, portly, adoring partner Danny (Nick Frost). They’re talking about the bad guys’ towering henchman, Lurch (an Addams Family reference):
Danny: Lives in the country with his mum and his sister.
Nick: And are they as big as he is?
Danny: Who?
Nick: The mum and the sister.
Danny: Same person.
A more obvious shout-out is another Danny line: “Forget it Nicholas, it’s Sandford.”
The movie is a lot of fun, something in strong demand as I write this, in the midst of a pandemic. I’m not sure how much you can trust IMDB’s Trivia section (probably not very) but the one for Hot Fuzz says the original script had a love interest for Nicholas, who was jettisoned, and her lines given verbatim to Danny.
I would believe it on the basis of a scene where, after a hard day on the mean streets of Sandford, the two cops unwind at Danny’s flat.
Nick: I just want to be… good at what I do.
Danny: You are good at what you do, you just need to switch off that big ol’ melon of yours.
Nick: That’s just it Danny, I don’t think I know how.
Danny: I can show you.
The meaning of the line turns out not to be what we imagine. Rather, Danny opens the doors to a closet, revealing a huge DVD collection.
Nick: By the power of Greyskull! [That’s a catchphrase from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe TV series.]
Danny: Point Break or Bad Boys II?
Nick: Which do you think I’d prefer?
Danny: No I mean which do you want to watch first?
They watch ’em both (and in BBII we hear Martin Lawrence utter the immortal line “Shit just got real”–which I will credit to screenwriter Ron [Bull Durham] Shelton). But first up is Point Break (1991), the surfing-set thriller with Keanu Reeves as FBI agent Johnny Utah, and Patrick Swayze as the Reagan-mask-wearing bad guy who, in this scene, he finally gets in his sights.
As you can see, Danny is very into the scene, specifically, as he had said to Nick earlier in the film, the way Reeves “goes to shoot Swayze,but he can’t cause he loves him so much and he fires up in the air and he’s going ‘aaaargh’ … Have you ever fired your gun up in the air and gone ’aaaargh’?”
Nick answers in the negative, but by the end of Hot Fuzz one of the boys will have fired his gun up in the air and gone “aargh.” If you’re reading this close to the time of writing, I suspect you have some time on your hands. So watch the movie (it’s available on YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and most of the usual suspects), and you can find out which one.
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