Have the right expectations.

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 2007)

Shaun of the Dead parodied Zombie films (although I had not seen Romero's films) and by all appearances Hot Fuzz was a parody of the cop/action genre. The films starts off this way but I felt like the writers had nowhere near enough jokes to fill a movie so they had to invent a story. The lead character moves to a boring town (for a policeman) which doesn't seem like the most interesting way to start a police/action story. The small country town setting could have come straight out of Heartbeat and only Simon Pegg's presence throughout keeps the film from descending into amateurism.
Timothy Dalton in a very enthusiastic performance is revealed to be the town villain but a Scream-like plot is introduced before he can be hauled away. This extends the film another half an hour but it left me wondering what the film was supposed to be about.
I think watching Shaun of the Dead may have given me false expectations of this movie and I think if I knew that it was something more akin to The Parole Officer than National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon I could have enjoyed it more.
I found Hot Fuzz entertaining but I felt they could have done a lot more with the opportunity and that it's probably best suited to the domestic British audience.