Hot Fuzz (***)

The British director-writer team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg follow up their successful zombie parody Shaun of the Dead by turning their attention to the cop drama. Pegg plays London officer Nicholas Angel, who’s embarrassed his colleagues by arresting four times as many criminals as the rest of the force. Angel would say police service, as police regulations require, not force. Dispatched to the hinterlands, an award-winning “village of the year” that hasn’t had a murder in 20 years, Angel zealously rounds up the underage drinkers, public urinators, and other such villains as populate the town. This fails to impress nearly everyone save the happy-go-lucky son of the chief, who’s gotten his impression of big-city cops from American action films like Point Break and Bad Boys II. Angel’s reaction to watching these gems is to fret about all the paperwork all that mayhem would generate.

Until the end, it’s not so much a spoof as a cop film that happens to be funny in a gentle, English sort of way, though not hilarious. And then it explodes with a lengthy action sequence that, like Shaun, simultaneously spoofs and celebrates its target, in this case those same action films. Timothy Dalton as an oleaginous supermarket owner and Jim Broadbent as the police chief are among the familiar faces in the supporting cast. I’d have to give a slight edge to Shaun, just for the way it simultaneously works as both a spoof and a horror film. In contrast, you can’t really watch this as straight police film. Things get a little too bizarre for that, but the quirky but not-outrageous characters keep things sort of grounded until that smashing ending.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425112/