parody has always been satire’s ne’er-do-well stepbrother, but the cinema of recent years has been particularly unkind to it, with Scary Movie and its ilk actively devolving the genre into strings of crass jokes and shallow pop culture references swept from the floor of an unfruitful Cracked Magazine writer’s meeting. so exhilarating, then, that Hot Fuzz sees Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg deliver on the promise of their “zom-rom-com” Shaun Of The Dead, thoughtfully turning their eye to contemporary action film with affection, respect, and no small amount of wit. it’s Wright’s grip on the grammar of the Big-Ass Action Flick that really sells it; Hot Fuzz’s quiet first act, for instance, is occasionally punctuated by rapid, showy montage that, recontextualized into the mundane, highlights an inherent obnoxiousness, while the film’s action-packed climax cribs directly (and effectively) from the Michael Bay / Tony Scott playbook with playful awe.as impressive as the artifice is, though, the film obviously couldn’t rely on stylistic quotation alone. thankfully Fuzz’s script is full of both the low-key, character-driven comedy and clever command of genre that made Shaun Of The Dead such a joy, and the way the three elements work together reveals a lot about the nature of accomplished parody. the film has its own story to tell, and weaves genre convention (subverted, exalted, or both) together with genuine comedy where lesser efforts would simply rely on one to prop up the other. the result, then, is maybe less a parody than a riotously funny, only slightly backhanded homage.
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