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This Film On

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Hot Fuzz

(2007)

121 min. Rogue Pictures. Director: Edgar Wright. Cast: Jim Broadbent, Nick Frost, Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward, Simon Pegg.

Consult the Anglophiles you know, and they just may tell you that the team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are the best thing to happen to the British film industry since Richard Curtis. After making his name for penning the Britcom Black Adder, Curtis moved on to big-screen rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones' Diary, and Love Actually. The next-generation Wright and Pegg collaborated on the Britcom Spaced before making an international splash with the rom-zom-com (romantic zombie comedy) Shaun of the Dead.

Wright and Pegg are known for their pop culture savvy and irreverent humor. Their new film, like Shaun, finds Wright directing, Pegg starring, and the two co-authoring the script. Hot Fuzz is a spoof of buddy-cop movies crossed with a parody of English horror (to say which film in particular would give away the twist, but the genre tweaking allows the duo again to indulge in squeamishly comical gore). Pegg plays severe, by-the-book London police sergeant Nicholas Angel, a cop so perfect that he horribly embarrasses his mediocre colleagues.

Relegated to "rural policing" in a small village, Angel is aghast at his small-potatoes duties and his slovenly new partner, PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost of Shaun and Spaced). In the shadow of his father the police chief (Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, doing an amusing provincial accent), Danny fanaticizes over cop movies. Seeing in Nicholas a reflection of his cinematic heroes, Danny can't believe his new partner hasn't seen Bad Boys 2 and Point Break, two of the many films Hot Fuzz amusingly pastiches.

The number of targets at which Hot Fuzz aims makes the film endearingly overstuffed. It's also a curiously high-strung movie, thanks to its easily annoyed leading man and an editing scheme patterned on Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. If, at a full two hours, all the movie geekery becomes a bit wearying, it's a fair trade for a comedy with some genuine chops and a pleasing sense of the absurd, inclusive of a swan on the loose, an imposed night at the am-dram version of Romeo and Juliet (Baz Luhrmann-style), or the allusive epithet "By the power of Greyskull!"

Best of all is the cast, led by the practiced chemistry and crack-timing of Pegg and Frost. The supporting cast is a veritable who's who of British screen: former Bond Timothy Dalton is on hand as a suave baddie, and Stuart Wilson, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw are among the veteran thesps who play villagers. Comedy stars Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, Steven Merchant, and Bill Bailey also pass through in brief roles. As always, Wright keeps the action moving to a tasteful pop-rock soundtrack and leaves no stone unturned, whether it's the homoeroticism of buddy-cop movies or the silly lengths to which plots will go to squeeze in an explosion.