Hot Fuzz: What Lies in the Dark Underbelly of a Small Town in England

Gunshots fire into the night as our hero comes diving out of a speeding car going ninety miles an hour. He hits the ground with an impressive tuck and roll not injuring him in the least. He jumps to his feet and shoots off another thirty rounds out of his nine millimeter beretta made all the more impressive by the fact that there's only eighteen rounds in the gun. The bad guys are all firing semi automatic rounds back but our hero doesn't flinch as a matter of fact the bullets don't even get close ricocheting off the ground and embedding themselves in the wall behind him. He takes them all out one by one, and with every hot shell casing that hits the ground so does another bad guy. Drowned out by the sound of the epic gunfight is the faint sound of backup about to arrive to the scene, one bad guy yells to the other, "Here comes the fuzz."

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg arrived on the global stage with their hit film "Shaun of the Dead." With witty biting humor they took a genre that has seen its fair amount of play, the zombie movie, and gave it a fresh turn. One was left though to imagine what they would have done with another film genre. That was until 'Hot Fuzz' made it's way to theaters.

'Hot Fuzz' itself is as much of an homage as it is a spoof of the over the top action movie. Basically Nicolas Angle, I'm sorry Angel, is a big city cop who is forced to transfer out of London and into a small quiet country town called Sandford. Sandford would be a nice quiet little town if it wasn't for the fact that people started to die left and right. While the hapless local cops believe this just to be unfortunate accidents the hard boiled Angel sees something else. This leads him to find a dark secret of murder and corruption and he is left with no choice but to kick some ass.

Like 'Shaun of the Dead' the writing is tight and in some instances brilliant with repeating lines of dialogue that act as a call back to earlier parts of the movie. The humor was intelligent and witty never feeling like it was sinking to the lowest common denominator as a matter of fact I feel smarter for laughing at a few of their jokes. 'Hot Fuzz' is also littered with great acting throughout with some of England's finest coming in to deliver crushingly funny performances. The best of these is Timothy "I was Bond" Dalton who steals every scene that he is in with Simon Pegg and some of the scenes he's barely in, dare I say this is his best performance since Flash Gordon, yes I believe I do (and that includes James Bond and the bad guy in The Rocketeer for crying out loud). Also Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play off of each other to perfection, the scenes that they share are quiet simply the funniest in the film.

The only point that I have against 'Hot Fuzz' is the sometimes epileptic educing editing some times got distracting to me. But other than that I thought it was the best spoof of the action genre since 'Hot Shots' and even though it was a spoof of sorts it has enough action in it to run with the Hollywood bid dogs. What 'Shaun of the Dead' did for Horror, 'Hot Fuzz' does for action. And all of you who are thinking about going to that small town in England and starting some trouble, Don't, or else you're going to have to deal with Inspector Nicolas Angel. "Forget it Nick, it's Sandford!"