I’ve now seen Hot Fuzz twice, and as you might expect, loved it even more the second time. For those of you who don’t know me in the real world (or from various online forums), I’ve been obsessed with the comedy of Messrs. Wright, Pegg, and Frost for a few years now, anticipating Hot Fuzz with bated breath. The first viewing wasn’t exactly a let-down, but wasn’t exactly what I expected. With a second viewing under my belt, I think it’s nearly the equal of their first film, Shaun Of the Dead.

Here’s the thing, though — both Spaced (their fantastic, fantastic Channel 4 comedy from a few years back) and Shaun featured relatively normal, uh, “losers with hearts of gold” thrown into surreal and sometimes crazy situations. There was a core of relative normalcy to the characters that carried them through the ridiculous situations (ranging from, in Spaced, punching out a male performance artist named “Vulva” while hallucinating zombies to… well, fighting real zombies). For the beginning of the zombie episode of Spaced, check this out:

In Hot Fuzz, right off the bat, we’re told that Pegg’s character, Nicholas Angel, is a nearly superhuman supercop who is then thrown into the belly of (apparent) normalcy in the sleepy West Country town of Sandford. I’m not sure that works quite as well, at least not with these actors. There’s something affably schlubby about Pegg on screen and seeing him try to be a hardass was jarring at first — the first viewing, I couldn’t stop laughing every time they cut to Pegg running.

The second viewing, though, is where I really noticed the writing. You can see how they leave hints for later gags earlier on in the movie (Shaun‘s “next time I see you, you’re dead” line, or Hot Fuzz‘s use of the swan). Something about how they write pays off multiple viewings, so it’s not much surprise that the reviews weren’t stellar (while generally positive). I dunno, I’m not sure I can fairly characterize this in a blog post, but there’s something about the repetition of these gags that makes them so, so much funnier (the second viewing, I busted out laughing at an otherwise unfunny line, when Stephen Merchant says “slender NECK”). On the DVD for Shaun, they included a “flip chart” (filmed right after Wright and Pegg had finished the screenplay), showing a glimpse of the story before they filmed it. I hope something like ends up on the Hot Fuzz DVD, too.

Finally, the extended set piece at the end of the film — from the granny kicking through the Godzilla-like stomping around the model village — worked fantastically for me. Wright should just go ahead and make a real, sans-comedy action film, just to see what it would be like. The end of Shaun was jarring to a number of friends of mine, who like their zed-word movies full of lots of spoofing but apparently can’t handle a little disemboweling. I think Wright and Pegg work best when they veer away from mockery into doing genuinely kickass genre work. I’d love to see Wright do a straight-up version of his Grindhouse fake trailer, “Don’t,” for instance:

Mainly because I think it’d be fun to see Mark Gatiss and Rafe Spall eviscerated on screen. (Grindhouse deserves its own entry, and I’ll try to do that soon).

Anyway, re: Hot Fuzz, here‘s a nice roundup from last month on my favorite film blog, the Greencine Daily, with more mixed reaction than I would like. I’m curious, were most of these reviewers to see the movie a second time, do you they’d enjoy it more? I did.