Hot Fuzz
Hot Fuzz is an odd combination of spoof and light comedy, of gory decapitations and quaint English humor. The first 3/4 of the movie is a mostly lightweight story of an overzealous police officer, Sergeant Nicolas Angel, who has been assigned to a sleepy English village so that he’ll stop driving his London colleagues insane with his perfectionism. The sleepy English village turns out to have more in common with Stepford than with, well, a normal village. Angel, played by Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the movie with director Edgar Wright, is confronted with a series of suspicious fatal accidents and a police force that is disdainful of any attempts at criminal investigation. Pegg and Wright are the team behind the zombie spoof, Shaun of the Dead.
Angel’s partner, the rotund and good-natured Danny (Nick Frost), seems willing to play along with Angel for the sake of having someone to talk to. Meanwhile, Timothy Dalton keeps appearing at the site of the latest fatality complete with sinister leer and none-too-subtle commentary on what really happened. Jim Broadbent plays Danny’s father, the police chief who tries to persuade Angel to leave things alone, and Cate Blanchett makes an uncredited cameo as Nicolas’s ex, though we only see her eyes so it might as well have been anyone. (For that matter, according to IMDB, Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame also has an unrecognizable and uncredited cameo.)
This part of the movie is entertaining enough, but it really serves as a setup for the most improbable movie police shoot-out I’ve seen. The finale is an over-the-top parody of Lethal Weapon and all of its cinematic descendants, complete with a cop armed to Terminator levels, slow-motion bullet-dodging, bad guys who can’t hit the broad side of a barn, and gore galore. It’s quite funny. The movie just takes a little too much time to set it up.