Awesome, Awesome, Awesome

Rating: 10/10 (14 May 2010)

To preface the following review I'm going to say that Edgar Wright is one of the best directors of our time. I'm not saying one of the best COMEDY directors. I'm saying one of the best directors PERIOD.
Hot Fuzz is amazing, the style is kinetic and wild, the dialogue outright hilarious, and the cartoonish violence (which, despite being cartoonish is gratuitous) is very, very entertaining. Honestly, I never think I've laughed at a guy's head being crushed by a huge piece of pointed marble from the top of a giant church, which I say not to condone violence, only to state that, like Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright has a way of making things that aren't funny in real life funny in the movies.
Seriously people, drop your pseudo-intellectual, film buff, well-read guard for an hour and forty minutes or so and just laugh at the violent acts committed in this film, because if you laugh at violent acts in a movie such as Hot Fuzz it is not because you want to commit them, it's because the director has made them FUNNY, and that's all there is to it. To sum it up: You laugh because the acts of violence are either so implausible or so stupidly committed and covered up that to see them treated in such a serious manner is funny.
But aside from all that about the violence, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost give excellent performances, and to see the relationship that develops between their characters is one of the finest qualities of this movie. The way it takes the conventions of the Buddy-Cop sub genre and subverts them is hilarious. It even gets to the point of them sitting down and watching action and buddy-cop movies like Point Blank and Bad Boyz II.
I also enjoyed how Simon Pegg didn't allow himself to be typecast and how Edgar Wright didn't want to typecast him anyway. Nicholas Angel is completely different from Shaun (of the Dead) in every way. He takes initiative, doesn't slack off, and is serious about nearly everything. And the amazing part is that Simon Pegg pulls this off astonishingly.
Finally, the standout scene of the movie, in which practically everybody in the village has a gun and engages into a gunfight with Simon Pegg's character Nicholas Angel, is one of the best gunfights I've ever seen in a movie, and to make a gunfight entertaining, engaging, and hilarious at the same time is quite a feat.
I would love to see Edgar Wright direct a serious movie one day, to take his style and put it in a different context, but if he commits himself to only making comedies, well, I'm perfectly happy and excited about that too.
Go see Hot Fuzz, if not for anything else, to see Simon Pegg jump through the air shooting guns.