Hot Fuzz

Though I was not familiar with the main actors in Hot Fuzz, I still enjoyed their performances in this very-British parody take on cop-buddy action movies like Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon. Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is a top notch hardworking cop in London who gets promoted and dumped into rural Sandford village. This sleepy village where everyone seems to know everyone else has zero crime and gets on Angel’s nerves, who yearns for crime and action. He befriends his plump fellow officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) and they turn into buddies. But (thankfully) Sandford is not really as calm as it looks on the surface. Prominent village folks start dying in what look like accidents, but Angel quickly discovers are serial murders. It is up to Angel and Danny to pull the blankets off Sandford and find the manslayers.

The chemistry between and the acting of the fast and slick Simon Pegg and the slow and bumbling Nick Frost works strongly for Hot Fuzz. It is hard to imagine this movie without them. They share lots of really hilarious slapstick lines and scenes between them. Add to that the frustration of Pegg caught in a sleepy village filled with old folks, which is well milked for laughs. The first half of the movie is especially funny, filled with British action comedy, something which I have seen rarely. The latter half turns into a comic Hollywood-isque shoot-em-up and blow-em-up. This is where the movie starts to show its limits, a little help from Hollywood might have helped. Still Hot Fuzz turns out to be a rib tickling action comedy, which can easily be watched a few times.

Rating: 3/4 (Pegg & Frost churn up a good action comedy, British-style)