Monday, March 26, 2007

Hot Fuzz

Hot Fuzz is the new action comedy film from Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright and Nick Frost- if you liked Spaced or Shaun of the Dead, you'll be sure to love this. They've taken that most American of films- the buddy cop movie- and transplanted it to rural England. And they've done a remarkable job. Pegg plays London's top cop, one so good at his job that he's sent to the counties in order to stop showing the rest of the force up. There he finds himself in a quiet town with virtually no crime- or so it seems. As the story unfolds the British bobbies get tooled up and a massive shoot-out ensues. It's just great fun- when I wasn't laughing I had a great big smile on my face. Hot Fuzz is eminently enjoyable- well paced, well acted, superbly edited and just a pleasure to watch. It does have a few gruesome special effects too- all the more effective because they are quite unexpected.

If you're into guns there's a lot to like about it too. Hot Fuzz features an eclectic mix of firearms; Beretta 92s, a Jericho, a Lee Enfield rifle, an M14, an FN FAL, a bunch of pump action shotguns and even a Steyr-Solothurn MP34 (although my father thinks it might be a Lanchester I'm tending towards the Solothurn designation- I think I might be right on this one).

UPDATE - More on the Steyr/Lanchester debate here.

Trailer here.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry mate, it's a Lanchester - it was the standard sub-machine gun of the RAN during WW2. It was even supposed to be the Army's, but they went with the Sten at the last minute. strangelybrown@gmail.com

Anonymous said...

Gad, Royal Navy, not the Royal Australian Navy.

Jay.Mac said...

Yeah, I know the Lanchester's history and that was the reason that my father chose it too- seemed more likely for a British weapon to appear in a British film.

However, I still think it's a Steyr Solothurn.I'm pretty sure that the muzzle is like the Steyr rather than the flat "nose" of the Lanchester- and if you watch the trailer you can see that there's a big stainless steel cocking handle- which looks more like the Steyr's than the Lanchester's. Then there's the top profile of the weapon- the Steyr and Lanchester are both quite similar but the Steyr's rear sight is set further back and there's a kind of curve along the side of the weapon just behind the magazine housing.

Jay.Mac said...

Just got the trailer and checked it out again- if you pause it at 99.135 seconds using FLV player you can see the top of the weapon- and I'm sure that's a Steyr Solothurn.

Rear sight well back and a kind of screw set just behind it.

Definitely a Steyr.

Jay.Mac said...

Posted a screen cap here-

http://crypticsubterranean.blogspot.com/2007/04/hot-fuzz-gun.html