ScreenWize

A quiet English country village – complete with vicars, old ladies and church fetes - seems an unlikely setting for a savage parody of the American cop-buddy genre, but the Shaun of the Dead team of Edgar Wright (co-writer and director) and Simon Pegg (co-writer and lead actor) come out with all guns blazing, combining their sharp wit with some stylish action editing to make a thoroughly entertaining spoof.

Pegg plays Sergeant Nicolas Angel, a star performer and man of action in the London police force who is transferred - against his will - to the quiet backwater of Sandford. In this small village police station, Angel is frustrated by his incompetent colleagues, most of whom spend the day eating. Outside, his greatest challenges are lost swans and mumbling farmers. He teams up with Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) the overweight and delightfully naïve son of the local Police Inspector, and it these two who provide much of the humour as they shake down mainstream cop thrillers from Lethal Weapon to Bad Boys II, with some Midsomer Murders thrown in for good measure.

The first half of the film is fabulous, with the gags – both verbal and visual - hitting their targets with low-key deadpan accuracy. Pegg and Frost are masters of the understated double take, and quietly milk their cop-buddy relationship for all its worth, almost taking it into romantic comedy as they get closer than cop buddies really should. Wright’s snappy direction and some superb editing by Chris Dickens (also from the Shaun of the Dead team) contribute to a breathless and highly energetic first sixty minutes. But as the overly complex plot then kicks into gear, Hot Fuzz comes off the boil, and by the end the laughs are few and far between as Wright forgets he has written a parody and gets lost in the more serious business of concluding his own story. But the long and indecisive ending doesn’t spoil a warmly funny film packed with a fine collection of English actors – including Bill Nighy, Edward Woodward and Timothy Dalton.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon