Dead Right

During holidays and weekends, eighteen-year-old Edgar Wright and his friends made a film that is much bolder than Craven’s Scream in breaking and exposing genre rules. Based on the economic logic of the matter, affiliation with a genre (or genres) is only feigned, the actors step out of their roles according to the needs of the narrative, and the people behind the camera (including the director) are also forced to actively participate. Wright uses the framework of Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon to ridicule the authorities and “their” high British culture, beginning with an opening moralistic warning about the harmfulness of the content and continuing with splatter effects, tasteless humour and the expressing of distaste for a certain brand of cereal. Wright had even greater disdain for overly clever British crime films (without blood spatter and car chases), to which he responded as a movie fan by making a film the likes of which would probably not be made in his homeland for a long time to come. The protagonists characteristically did not learn their special police methods from their superiors, but rather from American genre flicks, in which lies one of the many similarities with Hot Fuzz, which itself is basically an extended version of Dead Right. As in Hot Fuzz fourteen years later, cop movies are simultaneously parodied and deeply admired, so it’s hard not to give in to Wright’s youthful enthusiasm for the project and admire the director’s imaginative and very mature handling of various formalistic refinements. Let’s set aside the inevitable imperfection of the film’s craftsmanship and not go looking for what kind of cinematic trash Wright devoured before reaching the age of maturity (I assume he had seen a full range of video nasties from A to Z), and enjoy this enthusiastically overwrought mix of action, crime, slasher, slapstick and buddy movie. 90% (28.11.2013)