Hot Fuzz
15, 120 mins

Britain’s most successful film geeks are back. After tackling the zombie genre with Shaun of the Dead , the writer/director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and star Simon Pegg this time get to rummage through their encyclopaedic knowledge of cop movies.

Hot Fuzz employs much the same technique as Shaun. The creakiest of genre conventions and the hack director’s repertoire of flashy gimmicks are polished off and juxtaposed against a backdrop of mundane Englishness. The pair’s feature debut had the undead hauling themselves past the corner shops and off-licences of a quiet North London suburb, but Hot Fuzz plays up the ludicrous contrasts still further, setting a hardboiled cop actioner against a chocolate-box village in the West Country.

BACKGROUND

• Hot Fuzz

• Hot Fuzz - Sunday Times review

• Hot Fuzz blows the barn doors off

• Shaun of the Dead

Meet the flying squad

Kevin Maher takes a spin with the stars of police comedy Hot Fuzz

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Pegg plays it ramrod straight as Nicholas Angel, a supremely efficient career cop whose formidable arrest record is making the rest of the Metropolitan Police look rather useless by comparison. Their solution is to promote him. The catch is that he’ll have to trade crack-heads with Kalashnikovs for pensioners proffering scones.

To make matters worse, the village where Nicholas is headed is officially the safest in England. With a crime rate of practically zero, the local Neighbourhood Watch concern themselves with pernicious menaces such as street performers and New Age travellers. Nicholas grits his teeth and consoles himself by collaring a few underage drinkers and a drunk driver on his first night in the village. Unfortunately, on Nicholas’s inaugural day at his new job he learns that the boozy driver is his future partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). What’s more, his new colleagues trivialise the gravity of Danny’s offence and suggest that buying Black Forest gateaux for the whole station is a suitable punishment. That night Nicholas sits alone, tending his Japanese peace lily and brooding.

Pegg hasn’t written himself a particularly likeable character. Nicholas takes police work so seriously that we’re 40 minutes into the movie before we see him smile.

We warm to him only when he’s filtered through the puppyish enthusiasm of his new partner. What’s more, Nicholas is initially funny only through the juxtaposition of his supercop persona and his pedantic obsession with politically correct police jargon — Pegg has graciously given the best lines in the film to the rest of the cast.

Still, with a cast this impressive, the gags are hardly going to waste. British comedy stalwarts such as Jim Broadbent, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy are joined by the likes of Anne Reid, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw. Timothy Dalton brings a lupine sneer to the role of a supermarket manager, keen fun-runner and all-round cad, Simon Skinner. Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall make a gleefully petty double act as the village CID.

It’s not until the second hour of the film that Wright unleashes the big guns, both in terms of the laughs and the firearms. He’s confident enough in his own skills and in his audience’s patience to set up jokes and then leave them hanging, finally providing a punch line in the last few minutes of the movie. And Wright is obviously having tremendous fun aping the adrenalised mayhem of the Hollywood cop movie — the editing unleashes a manic assault of images; the soundtrack a hilariously over-the-top clash of bone-shattering cracks and bangs. Even the paperwork is edited to the sound of pistol shots and thrash metal.

The extended shoot-out is as exuberantly ludicrous and loud as anything John Woo or Michael Bay has directed. But it has one thing its predecessors never had: a nice cup of tea and some biscuits once the dust has settled.

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