Great spoof of buddy-cop action flics

Rating: 9/10 (19 February 2019)

Overachieving cop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) gets rousted out of London for making his fellow constables look bad and ends up in Sandford, an idyllic Yorkshire town, where murders never occur (but there are a lot of accidents). Instantly disliked by the rest of the underwhelming Sandford constabulary, Angel is partnered with Constable Butterman (Danny Frost), the bumbling son of the local police chief, who has dreams of being a hard-ass action-hero cop like the ones in his extensive video collection. Angel soon finds that an escaped swan is the least of their problems and that paradise can be a paradox. The film is very well done, with Pegg and Frost leading a great cast of amusing characters. The plot is clever, the script quite funny, especially the riffs on political correctness, and almost every cliché in the action-cop genre is parodied. This is the second of director Edgar Wright's 'Three Flavours Cornetto' trilogy, preceded by the hilarious "Shaun of the Dead" (2005) and followed by the somewhat less successful "The World's End" (2013). Funny stuff if you don't mind a little blood (or bolognaise) splattered on your comedy.