Awesome

Rating: 9/10 (28 March 2007)

Hot Fuzz is the story of Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), hardboiled super-cop. Intimidated by his arrest record, his cameo-appearance superior officers (Martin Freeman, Steven Coogan, and Bill Nighy) transfer him from the busy streets of London to the sleepy village of Sandford to keep him out of the way and balance the books, because, to be honest, he's making the rest of them look bad. A big cop in a small town, Angel sees murders and conspiracies where the cameo cast of cops and locals see accidents, but, with the help of his partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), it's not long before he discovers that not everything in Sandford is quite what it seems.
Sound clichÃ©d? Good. That's the point. Once settled in Sandford, Hot Fuzz becomes a vehicle designed to send up every action film that has ever taken itself even slightly seriously from Police Story to Point Break, and it does this brilliantly by simply taking everything from these films and pushing them that bit further, making them appear both ridiculous and awesome at the same time. The characters are massively exaggerated (especially Pegg's super-cop and Timothy Dalton's fantastically over-the-top super-villain). The action sequences are outrageous, exciting, and feature a surprising degree of rough justice, perhaps most notably in the form of an old woman getting karate-kicked in the face (or maybe a pub landlord getting his head bear-trappedÂ…). The dialogue ranges from obvious parody ("Did you tell him to cool off?") to clever Pegg-Frost exchanges, and even the music is perfectly balanced between action-scene rock songs and mock-epic slow guitar pieces.
However, that's not to say that Hot Fuzz is non-stop comic action. The first half an hour or so seems a little slow, but there's no reason to worry; the cast are simply setting up jokes to be knocked down later on, and it is definitely worth the brief wait for the well-paced comic-action masterpiece that's lying just around the corner. As with Shaun of the Dead, the people behind Hot Fuzz are affectionately poking fun at a genre that they clearly love, creating a film that embraces its genre's inherent ridiculousness, and is all the better for it.