Bloody, and Bloody Funny

Rating: 7/10 (28 April 2007)

Hot Fuzz is a cheeky British parody of both the Agatha Christie murder mystery and the American violent cop (think Bad Boys I and II) genres. It starts out amusingly ridiculous, moves to snickeringly ludicrous, then takes it up a few notches to gigglingly over the top. Oddly enough, it's when the violence and gunplay got most extreme that I laughed the most. The hyper-violence, though cartoonish to adults, might be inappropriate for pre-teens, though.
Simon Pegg, who also co-wrote the screenplay, stars as the nearly believably, over-virtuous constable Nicholas Angel of London's Metropolitan Police Service. Two years into the job, and Angel has 400% more arrests than the next best cop, making everyone else on the force look like a slacker by comparison. So, to eliminate this embarrassment, the chief ships him off to the countryside (the amusingly ridiculous part).
Angel arrives in the sleepy hamlet of Sandford in Gloucestershire, where the town immediately seems a bit a Stepford-esquire. Angel swoops in and continues his incredible conscientiousness, pissing off townfolk and co-workers alike, except for the hero worship of his lazy, bumbling partner, Danny, the local police chief's son (and co-writer of the screenplay). Angel is bored out of his mind until there is a gory and apparently accidental death. Certain incongruities make him suspicious, although his coworkers can't believe that in their serene little town, this would be anything more than an accident. A few more of these, and Angel gets properly exercised, mostly at the police dept.'s comic unwillingness to believe that the deaths are connected. At this point, I was involved enough to share Angel's frustration, although the parody of the buddy cop relationship kept me chuckling.
When Angel uncovers the truth behind the deaths and the town itself (the snickeringly ludicrous part), he takes it upon himself to take down all the bad guys himself. Of course, Danny rises to the occasion to help him. This is where the movie abandons all pretense of believability and goes gigglingly off the rails.
To enjoy Hot Fuzz, you must not take anything in the movie seriously. The movie is not dumb, it's just a sharp and bloody variety of slapstick.