by Craig Jelley

Created on: June 27, 2009   Last Updated: June 28, 2009

Hot fuzz, the second collaborative effort of writer-director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg, is a British homage to the American action movie. The film is written in the same vein to previous effort Shaun of the Dead but with the focus on guns and fights rather than zombies and pub defending.

The action focuses around Sergeant Nicholas Angel of the Metropolitan Police Force, sorry, Metropolitan Police Service, who is transferred to the idyllic, sleepy town of Sandford, Gloucestershire, after years of over-performing and making his colleagues look bad. Despite protests to the entire hierarchy of the Met., he is forced to leave for the quaint countryside community. Although initially underwhelmed by the community and his lethargic colleagues, including Shaun cohort Nick Frost as new partner Constable Danny Butterman, the town becomes embroiled in a spate of elaborately staged 'accidents' leaving many of the community six feet under and it's up to Angel and Butterman to solve the mystery.

The premise hardly seems like comedy gold, but anything in the hands of writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg could easily rouse laughter from the most stern of moviegoers. Wright and Pegg, who also worked together on British TV series 'Spaced', have a knack for crafting scripts that are effortlessly funny, gaining laughs from the most normal of phrases. One such example is when Angel receives a call in the middle of the night telling him, to his bemusement that someone has been "decaffeinated". An easy mistake for anyone to make in the wake of a beheading I'm sure. The parallelism throughout the movie is so neat and subtle that it brings the grin of a Cheshire cat to your face when you hear it. On helping a hotel owner with a crossword at the beginning of the film, the words 'hag' and 'fascist' are bandied about in a mock-insulting way, then again later on in the film whilst the two are fighting. All credit should go to Wright too, for his adept direction. His use of short, sharp cuts and simple composition give the film a stylish feel even with the mundane setting.

Unsuprisingly, the film shares more than one similarity to Shaun of the Dead. The previously mentioned short, sharp cuts were also a staple of Shaun, as are many of the supporting cast which includes the criminally-underrated Rafe Spall and Paddy Considine as well as Jim Broadbent and a very sinister Timothy Dalton, more akin to his Bond villain counterparts than Double-Oh-Seven himself. Cate Blanchett even manages

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