uproarious British spoof; a send-up that delivers the high-octane action, tons of puns and tasteless gags

Rating: 10/10 (21 April 2007)

Edgar Wright has somehow outdone himself from his previous first feature comedy/zombie movie, Shaun of the Dead, with his Hot Fuzz, a send-up of all those cop/law-enforcement movies where the style goes berserk and beyond post-modernism into some kind of frantic 'show-em-what-we-got' method of big-bang action and cheesy catch phrases amid an absurd plot. This time, Wright and co-writer/star Simon Pegg know very well how much the absurdism already goes on in those movies, particularly those by Michael Bay, and the send-up is all the more brilliant because there's nothing extremely hateful towards the movies (one might think, for sort of guilty pleasure sake, Wright and Pegg sit around watching these movies as much as the Danny character does in the film), and the level of zaniness imposed knows no boundaries.
Actually, the boundaries are sort of set by genre, however this even dips into movies such as The Wicker Man (which is actually very indebted to the main storyline), Scream, and even Godzilla in one scene. And unlike Shaun of the Dead, the gags, however subtle or post Monty Python they get, practically never stop. This time, tone doesn't drastically change; it's consistently with a tongue placed firmly in its Great British cheek. And speaking of Monty Python, as I walked out of the theater a late Python member popped in my mind in relation to Simon Pegg's Nick Angel in Hot Fuzz: Graham Chapman. Here, Pegg shows completely, like Chapman, that he's perfectly capable of playing the straight man in comedic situations, even more here than in 'Shaun', and that his level of being the "normal" in an otherwise zany comic setting makes it seemingly even.
Then, suddenly, in the third act, we see Pegg's character have to take a turn by way of how the story makes its dark twist in revealing the situation of the "accidents" that have been going on in the seemingly peaceful small town he's sergeant in, and finally, Pegg brings out the level of crazy comedic timing that's been under the surface the whole time. This climax, of course, is one of the funniest things about the film, but it's all been preempted by Wright and Pegg setting up the film with clichés and archetypes, turns that are pretty obvious each step of the way, and even in the moments that start to get less funny as mores-so amusing, and all the more ironic in that it's set among characters that bring out this level of comic hysteria.
At first, some of the humor is in little vicious stabs that strike out because of how blatant they are on the part of the filmmakers: the swan, the unintelligible small-town English folk (some with many, many, many firearms, which is sort of a spoiler by the way), a golden statue man, and a man in a costume of Death, as mere visual gags. Others, for me anyway, were almost in-jokes, like the laugh-out-loud bit with Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy (in the same frame no less). But it's not simply visual comedy, however that is a big factor in it all as Wright is almost TOO good at mimicking the hyper-kinetic Bay style of editing and jump-cuts. It's also that there's a great ensemble too, with Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Paul Freeman, Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall, even Timothy Hutton joins in relishing the underlying poke in the ribs in practically every scene.
Yet through all of the parodies and splashes, pun intended, of appropriately graphic violence (it comes close to Grindhouse, which Wright provided the "Don't" trailer, in wisely imploring gore and massive shoot-outs for comedy sake), there's a sharp level of wit in the dialog, a clever repore in making us actually care about some of the characters (Pegg and Frost anyway, especially after a bout with Point Break), and keeps you laughing when the whole shebang ends. As Danny says at one point, in a manner of speaking, "Man that's off the f**king chain!"