Film

Fortunately, Hot Fuzz offers a good deal more than opportunities to spot the references. A code-spouting, gravity-defying supercop, Sgt. Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is reassigned to the countryside because his arrest record embarrasses his London colleagues. Nick’s new stomping ground is allegedly the safest town in Britain, where the biggest problems are underage drinking and a street performer dressed as a statue.

Needless to say, not everything is as it seems. (The casting of creepfest luminaries Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw wittily underscores the point.) Corpses begin to pile up, and while the chief of police (Broadbent) is eager to write the deaths off as accidental, Nick and his partner (Frost) find themselves embroiled in a mystery that results, inevitably and inexorably, in shit blowing up. By the time a supermarket has turned into a battle zone, Hot Fuzz has proven more consistently funny than Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. It’s also a pointed reminder that for real cops, gleeful violence always exacts its revenge in paperwork.