fantastic but falls apart in the home stretch

Rating: 8/10 (2 September 2007)

From the makers of "Shaun of the Dead" comes "Hot Fuzz," a takeoff on cop buddy/action movies that is hilarious for about the first hour-and-a-half or so of its two-hour-plus running time, until it falls victim to its own over-the-top excesses.
Nicholas Angel is a London police officer with the highest arrest rate on the force. Does this statistic earn him a round of applause, an increase in pay, or a promotion to a higher rank, as one might expect? Heavens no. In fact, Angel is so good at what he does that he has become something of an embarrassment to the far less highly-motivated cops who work with him. Thus, he is sent to serve and protect the good citizens of Sandford, which is, we are told, the village with the smallest crime rate in all of England. At first, Angel understandably balks at being such a big crime-fighting fish in such a small, seemingly crime-free pond. And, indeed, he begins his service to the community by arresting large swaths of the city's population for decidedly minor infractions. Soon, however, Angel finds himself embroiled in a far more pressing case when prominent citizens suddenly begin showing up dead, the victims of a possible serial killer who may recently have begun operating in the vicinity.
In its initial stages, "Hot Fuzz" is wickedly funny both as a parody of cop movie conventions and as a wry commentary on British rural values. The typically dry and subtle humor arises from the juxtaposition of the by-the-book stick-to-itness of Angel with the lackadaisical indifference of virtually everyone else with whom he comes in contact. It would have been very easy for director Edgar Wright and his co-scenarist, Simon Pegg (who also plays Angel) to have reduced the character to the level of a mere caricature or buffoon. Instead, Angel comes across as a man fully aware of his high-strung obsessiveness (he's lost at least one marriage over it) yet powerless to change it. Pegg is wonderfully restrained and deadpan as the highly focused, crime fighting Angel, while Nick Frost makes a perfect foil as his inept, but starry-eyed partner who thinks the life of a cop should be more in keeping with what he sees in movies like "Point Break" and "Bad Boys II" than what he regularly experiences on the job in Sandford. There are fine performances, too, from Timothy Dalton, Martin Freeman, Jim Broadbent and Paddy Considine, and many others. And I defy you to pick out Cate Blanchett, Steve Coogan and Peter Jackson in their uncredited cameo appearances.
"Hot Fuzz" might have been a flawless, classic comedy had the filmmakers been able to refrain from over-indulging their very obvious fondness for large-scale action sequences. Indeed, it is not too long past the midway point that the movie begins to spiral out of control, as Wright and Pegg fall into the trap of mistaking parodies of tedious action scenes for tedious action scenes themselves.
Still, I choose to dwell not on the weaknesses of "Hot Fuzz," but rather on its strengths, for here is a film that at least knows how to make us laugh for a good deal of the time that we are in its company. And that's saying quite a lot these days.