The mad satirists behind the hilarious “Shaun of the Dead” are back, and this time they’ve got a much more deserving target than zombie flicks.
“Hot Fuzz” lays waste to every slick, overblown, heavy-hardware action movie of the last 15 years, especially the ones directed by Michael Bay or produced by Jerry Bruckheimer or Joel Silver.
A rapid-fire montage introduces us to London cop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), an extremely intense chap whose arrest rate is 400 percent higher than his fellow officers. His freeze-frame close-ups – while riding his bicycle – are a perfect parody of action-movie style.
To get rid of his overzealous example, Angel is shipped off to the rural enclave of Sandford, where crime is nonexistent and the lazy local police are busy eating cake. One of Angel’s first acts is to arrest a boorish, slovenly drunk driver (Nick Frost), who turns out to be one of his colleagues on the Sandford force.
It takes a while, perhaps too long, for to a story to emerge, but it’s a doozy when it comes. And the cast is full of juicy British character actors, including Jim Broadbent as the dotty police chief and former 007 Timothy Dalton spoofing his image as a very suspicious village character.
There’s also a gemlike early sequence in which three consecutive British funnymen deliver bad news to Angel: Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy make inspired cameos.
But much of the fun comes from the genre parody and the expert comedy of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The steel-jawed Pegg is altered from his slacker character in “Shaun,” while Frost is … well, pretty much the same dimwitted slob.
Pegg also scripted, with director Edgar Wright, who helmed “Shaun of the Dead” (he also directed one of the funny trailers in “Grindhouse”). The only complaint I can think of with this movie is that they’re guilty of having too many funny ideas.
By the time the giant shoot-out (quite gory, by the way) spills out of Sandford and into the miniature “model village” outside town, I was beginning to wonder when all this was going to wrap up.
But “too much” is better than “not enough,” so I can’t complain very long. Not when there’s a swan on the loose in Sandford – a police call that pays off in a variety of ways in this clever movie.
Nick Frost (left) and Simon Pegg star in “Hot Fuzz.”
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