[May contain slight spoilers]
Towards the end of Gangster Squad, there’s a moment where Josh Brolin’s iron-jawed, principled cop Jon O’Mara and Sean Penn’s rubber-faced mob kingpin Mickey Cohen trade punches. As Ruben Fleischer’s camera yet again spins into slow motion, the fighters are drenched by the flumes of a recently-smashed fountain. The overbearing sentiment to this scene isn’t one of absorption or tension – it’s an acknowledgement that the sequence is incredibly similar to Simon Pegg’s model village fight with Timothy Dalton in Hot Fuzz. Fleischer’s film has already borrowed liberally from Martin Scorsese, Alan Parker and Raymond Chandler at this point, so a little more mimicry isn’t too severe an offence.
Yet the Hot Fuzz comparison is an especially unfavourable one for Gangster Squad. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg lampooned the most high-octane entries in the buddy cop canon, yet their tongue-in-cheek take...
Towards the end of Gangster Squad, there’s a moment where Josh Brolin’s iron-jawed, principled cop Jon O’Mara and Sean Penn’s rubber-faced mob kingpin Mickey Cohen trade punches. As Ruben Fleischer’s camera yet again spins into slow motion, the fighters are drenched by the flumes of a recently-smashed fountain. The overbearing sentiment to this scene isn’t one of absorption or tension – it’s an acknowledgement that the sequence is incredibly similar to Simon Pegg’s model village fight with Timothy Dalton in Hot Fuzz. Fleischer’s film has already borrowed liberally from Martin Scorsese, Alan Parker and Raymond Chandler at this point, so a little more mimicry isn’t too severe an offence.
Yet the Hot Fuzz comparison is an especially unfavourable one for Gangster Squad. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg lampooned the most high-octane entries in the buddy cop canon, yet their tongue-in-cheek take...
- 1/9/2013
- Shadowlocked
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