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Great, action cop film parody with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

As a big fan of both ‘Spaced’ and Shaun of the Dead, I’d had Hot Fuzz queued up on LOVEFiLM since it was released in the cinema. We watched it last weekend, and I thought it was certainly up to the quality of Shaun of the Dead.

Hot Fuzz is a very affectionate parody of the genre of American action movies like Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon, but also 1970s British cop shows like The Sweeney, spaghetti westerns and so on. Wright and Pegg’s knowledge about and love of this genre means that it is superbly balanced between comedy and drama. It’s a very funny film, but the laughs never get in the way of the action.

Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is a very straight-laced, by-the-book PC in the Metropolitan Police, who is literally making the rest of the Force look bad with his phenomenal arrest rate. So he’s packed (unwillingly) off to a rural market town called Sandford, where he meets nice-but-dim PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). Danny is the son of the local Inspector, but when Nicholas first encounters him, he is attempting to drive his car while incredibly drunk. Danny hero-worships Nicholas, longing for what he sees as the exciting life of a Met police officer — all car chases and gun fights, while Danny is stuck with retrieving escaped swans. Inevitably, all is not as it seems in sleepy Sandford, and Nicholas begins to suspect that the very low crime rate but incredibly high accident rate is hiding a sinister secret.

The relationship between Nicholas and Danny is actually quite touching, and there are great performances from the whole cast. There’s quite a lot of swearing, and some pantomime violence and gore, but it all works really well. There are even a couple of cornetto jokes for Shaun of the Dead fans. It’s one of those films that you can watch several times because you miss details, and the extras on the DVD are superb. There’s a dubbed ‘TV’ version with all the swearing replaced with innocuous words, which is hilarious. “Peas and Rice!” might have to become my blasphemy replacement of choice.

As ever with Wright and Pegg, there are lots of quotable lines, but my favourite in this film was during a shoot-out in a local Somerfield supermarket (funny in itself if you know Somerfield), when one of the detectives, in full riot gear, was shot at down the pasta sauce aisle and splattered:

(In a West Country accent): It’s alright, Andy! It’s only bolognaise!