Hot Fuzz

A parody of the buddy-cop genre, directed by Edgar Wright! Top London cop PC Nicholas Angel is good. Too good. To stop the rest of his team looking bad, he is reassigned to the quiet town of Sandford. He is paired with Danny Butterman, who endlessly questions him on the action lifestyle. Everything seems quiet for Angel until two actors are found decapitated. It is called an accident, but Angel won't accept that, especially when more and more people turn up dead. Angel and Danny clash with everyone while they try to uncover the truth behind the mystery of the apparent "accidents".

Review from the New York Times

The wits behind the controlled chaos that is “Hot Fuzz,” a parody of Hollywood-style action flicks, wield a somewhat heavier comic cudgel than they did in their last big-screen outing, the zombie caper “Shaun of the Dead.” This time, as they say in the blow-up business, it’s personal, or at least somewhat personalized, since the more obvious targets here include high-octane producer-auteurs like Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver, who, with their fat budgets and armies of heavily armed bad boys, have helped define the modern action spectacular, reshaping the old kiss-kiss, bang-bang movie experience into the cinema of lock-and-load.

Simon Pegg, the snub-nosed, cricket-bat-swinging blond avenger of “Shaun of the Dead,” plays Nicholas Angel, a crack London police officer who’s bounced to a small town by his inferior superiors (Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman, smirking and smiling) for being just too damn good at his job. Banished to the sticks, where a missing snow-colored swan initially proves the only investigative distraction, he finds himself desperate for action. He rousts some teenagers from the local pub, but outside of fielding smutty insults from the precinct’s layabout detectives (Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall, as matching and mustachioed as a Tom of Finland cartoon), there’s little to do but water his lily plant and nurse his cranberry juice nightcap.

There are few girls allowed inside the Bruckheimer and Silver clubhouses, and so it is here. Although the homosocial worlds of Messrs. Bruckheimer and Silver on occasion make room for a Venus in leather like Carrie-Anne Moss or, more routinely, a neonatal-size waif like Keira Knightley, these are testosterone-fueled domains, largely defined by bulging muscles and exploding guns, both symbolic and actual. It’s a world that Mr. Pegg and the film’s director, Edgar Wright, who together wrote the awfully funny screenplay, know intimately and recreate with admirable fealty, from the hard-crashing edits to the soft, tender looks exchanged by Angel and his slavishly attentive sidekick, Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). It’s a world in which boys will be boys at every available opportunity.

Read the rest of the review from Manohla Dargis here...