Edgar Wright gives small lives the tempo of a car chase, and for a decade the cutting was the joke. The recent work is bigger, slicker and easier to forget; the early films with Simon Pegg are still the place to start.
Fi1m perspective
In Hot Fuzz (2007), Simon Pegg's Nicholas Angel notices that the pub's customers are too young to be there, and the film treats the moment as if he had walked in on a bank job. That is Edgar Wright's habit, and it was there from the start. In Spaced (1999) ordinary setbacks get the camera moves and the cutting of a thriller, and the joke is how large they feel to the person having them. By Baby Driver (2017) the same instinct had become the whole design: a getaway car turns when the song says turn, and the pleasure is in watching the action land exactly where the music put it.
The career splits cleanly in two. First the British years: Spaced, made for television with Pegg and Jessica Hynes, then Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz, with Pegg and Nick Frost, and The World's End (2013), which we have not reviewed. Then Hollywood: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), writing credits on The Adventures of Tintin (2011) and Ant-Man (2015), which he left before shooting, and after that Baby Driver, Last Night in Soho (2021), the documentary The Sparks Brothers (2021) and The Running Man (2025). Our scores for the films he directed have gone in one direction, and it is down.
What works is people. Pegg and Frost are funny together because the affection is real and Wright lets it sit; the friendship in Hot Fuzz is worth more than the shootout. Marcus Rowland's production design keeps the London of Shaun of the Dead so ordinary that nobody registering the zombies is easy to believe, and Chris Dickens cuts both films so that the chat and the scares run at one pace. We laughed out loud at the underage drinkers in Hot Fuzz, and we laughed because Pegg refuses to soften the policeman's seriousness for a second and David Arnold's score backs him up as if this were a real action film. Wright likes the films he borrows from, and the comedy is better for it.
What does not work is love, and it never has. Ramona in Scott Pilgrim, Debora in Baby Driver, Amelia in The Running Man: each actress does what she can, and each gets less room than the set piece around her. The fights pile up in Scott Pilgrim; the references pile up in Spaced; the chases pile up in The Running Man, which starts again every twenty minutes and explains its satire twice. His screenplays, with Pegg and later with Michael Bacall, are best with little plot and worst with a lot.
The Running Man is the first of his films with long stretches nobody would recognise as his. He said in 2017, of Baby Driver, "I’d been thinking about it for 22 years." That is the kind of film he should be making: one small idea, held a long time, cut to the bone. Start with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Come to the recent work afterwards, and expect it to look expensive.
Biography
Edgar Wright is an English filmmaker, director, screenwriter and producer. Born on 18 April 1974 in Poole, Dorset, he studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. He began with independent short films and his first feature, A Fistful of Fingers (1995), before directing television series including Spaced (1999–2001).
Wright is known for the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy: Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World's End (2013), all co-written with Simon Pegg. Other credits include Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), Baby Driver (2017) and Last Night in Soho (2021). He wrote the screenplay for Ant-Man (2015) and co-wrote the screenplay for The Adventures of Tintin (2011). He directed, wrote and produced The Running Man (2025).
