Funny Movie

Rating: 9/10 (2 September 2007)

Hot Fuzz is cleverly written and very funny. As with Shaun of the Dead the filmmakers take a Hollywood film genre and transplant into an English setting with weird and unlikely results. On one level it's a send-up of American action movies but it also takes a swipe at the suffocating, boredom of life in a small English village where nothing ever happens. The actors in Hot Fuzz look and talk like very average Englishmen. Hollywood action heroes, by comparison are usually buff, good looking and seem almost super human. The cast's very ordinariness is part of the film's charm, but they can seem out of place in their own movie.
Simon Pegg plays Nick Angel a London cop with an arrest record so good he makes everyone else in the Met look bad. As a reward, he is promoted and sent to, Sandford, a sleepy, backwater in rural Gloucestershire where there is absolutely no crime. Angel is a loner whose new colleagues resent his zeal and air of superiority. His new partner is an overweight but likable yokel(Nick Frost)who loves American action movies. The village of Sandford has a mysterious secret which Angel gradually uncovers and the film ends with a crazed gun battle involving little old ladies. The cast is excellent with Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward, Steve Coogan, Bill Nigy, Martin Freeman, Jim Broadbent and Billie Whitelaw in scene stealing roles. The film has to be seen to be believed and it's very entertaining.