No, I have not ever fired my gun up in the air and gone 'ahhhh.'

Rating: 9/10 (9 September 2009)

London's top cop, Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), is highly intelligent and extremely motivated, dedicated to his duty and a model of proper police work. He's so good, in fact, that he's been promoted Sergeant and rather unceremoniously booted out of the city and given a duty in the small town of Sandford, Gloucestershire, because he's making the rest of London's finest look rather bad. Unaccustomed to life in the small town, Angel finds himself busting underage drinkers at the local pub and chasing a loose swan around town instead of ridding London of its heinous criminal element. He's partnered with Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), a bumbling overweight officer with a craving for action that's influenced by his love of Cop films. Soon enough, the peaceful town becomes home to a string of terrible deaths; Angel suspects murder, but the other officers on the force reject his wild claims and pronounce each grisly corpse an accident victim. Angel believes local businessman Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton) to be centrally involved in the deaths, but Angel is finding it increasingly difficult to gather any evidence against him. Has Angel lost his edge in the idyllic small town atmosphere, or will his instincts lead him towards a deeper, darker discovery that could threaten to challenge all he knows about Sandford? The team of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright continue to impress with their ability to fully realize the potential of the Parody genre and hit the nail on the head in just about every single frame of their movies. There's very little about Hot Fuzz that doesn't work; the movie does slow down here and there and the two-hour runtime feels a little bit on the lengthy side for a picture of this sort, but otherwise there's little to complain about. Despite a low budget, Wright squeezes an enormous amount of pizazz out of the film. Of course, it's driven primarily by the two most crucial elements to a Parody: the quality of the script and the ability of the actors to pull it off. Though the genre has become fairly brain-dead over the past several years, Hot Fuzz recalls the quality of Mel Brooks but not necessarily the style; Wright's films are far flashier and a bit more subtle in their humor, but they're no less effective. Through all the laughs, the film enjoys an extremely high quality production value that gives the illusion of a much bigger budget; the special effects aren't mind-boggling but they're certainly effective and fun. The sets look fantastic and the props appear authentic, but once again it all plays second fiddle to the quality of the script and the performances of the actors, two factors which lend more to the overall excellence of any film than simply throwing money haphazardly into secondary and tertiary aspects of the process in hopes of obscuring a lousy plot or poor performances.
Tackling buddy cop movies, much of Hot Fuzz's scripted success stems from the fact that it doesn't even attempt to hide the movies it takes aim at. Nick Frost's character Danny is an Action movie junkie who dreams of living the lives of excitement, danger, clever reactionary dialogue, and slow-motion gunfights that populate the fictional worlds of flashy cops on the silver screen. Among his favorites are Bad Boys II and Point Break; his obsession with the genre allows Hot Fuzz an easy way to poke fun at the clichés that populate such films, whether he simply recalls his favorite scenes; watches them on video; or by the end of the film, experiences the ultimate Action movie shot: "firing two guns whilst flying through the air." This represents an excellent means through which to incorporate part of the primary source of humor; not only do audiences actually hear some of the important lines of dialogue ("this $#!% just got real" from Bad Boys II) or see some of the clips from the actual films that are the target of parody (Keanu Reeves shooting into the air in Point Break) that are later repeated by the main characters in Hot Fuzz, but it provides an absolute reference point for viewers that aren't necessarily familiar with those films. Aside from the scenes that offer a rather direct attack on the material, the primary plot itself incorporates more overreaching clichés that make Hot Fuzz a complete Parody film. There's the obligatory foot chase through town replete with a "jump over a series of fences" scene; the feeling-out period between partners; the personality split that threatens to tear the partners apart,(here the paradigm centers around one that's completely serious and grounded in reality while the other is not-so-serious and living in a fantasy world); goofy dialogue; investigative montages; and much more. Also helping the film immensely is the aggressive gore that springs up from time to time. It's rather over-the-top and in another sort of picture some of it would rival the more grotesque out there, but even beheaded, charred, and impaled-from-the-top-down corpses take on a humorous tone in context. The performances tie it all together, selling both the parody and taking the edge off the brutality of the film; Pegg and Frost are fantastic, of course, but the real star of the film is Timothy Dalton and his deliciously over-the-top effort. He never really disguises what his role in the film is, but his ability to keep Angel on his toes and put on a deceptive charm that doesn't sway audience opinion but keeps it from complete confidence in the initial assumption of who he really is all makes him the film's best all-around character.