The Audience Cut

On movies that don't know when to end, comfort films, and the critic in each of us.

Not long ago, I was convalescing from an illness of indeterminate seriousness. My wife called it “the lurgy” with pantomimed pity, but it was stomach-knotting and muscle-gelatinizing enough to confine me to a makeshift bed on the sofa. I asked plaintively (with only slight exaggeration of my woeful state) for soup to be brought to my sickbed, and I relaxed into my self-pity. I wondered if I should pick up the densely experimental novel I’d been reading or watch one of the comfort movies I go to when life delivers a K.O.

I chose to watch Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright’s almost perfect buddy-cop comedy. Almost? Its perfection runs right up to what I insist is the film’s proper final scene: the quick-cut montage of the movie’s villains having their mugshots taken, shot with such melodrama that the bureaucracy becomes funny. There’s another scene after that, sort of an epilogue and sort of a third-act climax, but not really either. It’s the film awkwardly lingering after it’s already finished, lik…