The director Edgar Wright and the actor/ writer Simon Pegg once described their first feature film, Shaun of the Dead, as “Richard Curtis shot through the head of George Romero”. Now comes their follow-up, Hot Fuzz, which could be described as Miss Marple shot through the head of Jerry Bruckheimer. Shaun of the Dead took the American zombie B-movie and gave it a comic twist by setting it in London. Hot Fuzz takes the style of the American cop film and sets out to give it a comic twist by placing cops, killers and carnage in a quiet English village.

The opening 20 minutes suggest we’re in for a treat. Wright relays the history of his main character, Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Pegg), and sets up the film’s premise in fast and furious style. Angel, we learn, is a London-based supercop with an arrest rate 400% higher than anyone else in the Met. He lives and breathes his job, and that’s why his girlfriend has dumped him and why the force wants to dump him too: he’s too damned efficient. Angel is to be transferred to a station in the small village of Sandford.

Here, we meet a bevy of British thespians: Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw. Sandford seems to be something out of The Archers, with a hint of The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs. Angel’s zero-tolerance approach to underage drinking and minor offences earns him a lot of animosity from workmates. But he develops a friendship with PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), a fat, naive plod who dreams of being like one of the action heroes in the US cop DVDs he loves. Angel seems doomed to apprehend small-time shoplifters and pursue missing swans until a series of grisly murders occurs, and he and Butterman have to become bad-ass fuzz to solve the case. The director, Wright, grew up in Somerset, and says he had a “fixation” with cop films such as Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and Bad Boys. For research, he and Pegg watched hundreds of their favourite cop films. The end result is a geeky work for lads who love cop films but have no interest in real life.

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

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Not only does Hot Fuzz name-check other films (Bad Boys II) and borrow sequences from movies such as Point Break, as well as memorable moments (the old lady with a machine gun in Lindsay Anderson’s If...), it style-checks numerous other directors of cop films, too. One running gag involves the boring paperwork that policemen have to complete, which Wright shows in the feverish, menacing, fast-cut style of Tony Scott. It’s funny the first few times we see it.

The problem here is that Hot Fuzz wants it both ways: to be a great British cop film, while being in awe of the American fare it is feeding off. It starts off as something distinctly British — and Pegg gives a wonderful, dead-pan performance that makes for natural comedy — but when the mystery of the village killings is exposed, the film becomes a big, American-style action number, with fantastic shoot-outs, explosions, car chases, fight scenes and all the mundane and mandatory trappings of the genre.

Unfortunately, it isn’t playing these scenes for laughs, it’s acting out the fantasies of its core audience: nice boys who wish they, too, could be bad boys. The plot is stuffed with familiar faces from British comedy — Steve Coogan, Bill Bailey, Martin Freeman — but it’s not as funny as it should be. It doesn’t have the exaggerated satirical thrust of a spoof such as the Scary Movie series or other cop-inspired takeoffs such as Loaded Weapon. Clearly, Wright and Pegg love the genre too much to send it up. They actually think all the shooting and car chases are cool.

Shaun of the Dead was small, cheap-looking and eager to please. Hot Fuzz is the kind of overindulgent, underwritten work that comes when your first film is a hit and you are handed the keys to the cinematic sweet shop. It bears all the signs of too much money and too much artistic freedom. If only someone had told these golden boys that their film went on far too long and needed numerous rewrites, Hot Fuzz would be more fun and a lot funnier.

Hot Fuzz 15, 120 mins Two stars

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