Babble

Having heartily skewered Romero-inspired zombie flicks in the 2004 cult hit Shaun of the Dead, director Edgar Wright and writer-actor Simon Pegg now turn their attention to American cinema's true plague: the Bruckheimer-derived buddy-cop picture. Their cheekiest idea this time is to dispense with the genre's usual wild-eyed renegades: Hot Fuzz's ostensible hero is one Nicholas Angel (Pegg), a doggedly by-the-book bobbie whose sterling arrest record and unimpeachable sense of professional ethics threaten to make the rest of London's police force look incompetent at best, wholly corrupt at worst. He's therefore transferred against his will to a quaint, cozy English village, where his new partner turns out to be the town drunk (Nick Frost, once again the ideal shambolic sidekick) and a typical day's work involves issuing a summons for jaywalking. Until, that is, various townsfolk begin meeting with mysterious "accidents," invariably in the vicinity of the village's unctuous excuse for a business mogul (Timothy Dalton).

Movies like Bad Boys II and Point Break are already more than halfway to self-parody, so it's remarkable how much comic mileage Hot Fuzz gets from shots of dorky English dudes strutting in slow-mo as a hot-orange fireball explodes directly behind them. It helps a great deal that Pegg, a ferrety screen presence whose entire head sometimes seems to be receding, possesses both pitch-perfect timing and surprising range; he's as magnificently uptight here as he was gloriously bewildered in Shaun of the Dead. But while nobody will fail to bust a gut laughing, it's hard to understand why a goofy lark like this should clock in at more than two hours. By the final half hour, it's hard to tell whether Hot Fuzz qualifies as spoof or straight-faced homage; Wright and company are having so much fun blowing shit up that their movie eventually threatens to become as tiresome as its targets. Save some of this stuff for the deleted-scenes section of the DVD, fellas. — Mike D'Angelo