"You've been making us all look bad," the police chief kindly explains to Nicolas Angel (Simon Pegg), a young upstart on the London Police Force with an arrest rate 400 percent higher than any of his colleagues. Fearing usurpation, Nicolas's superiors have decided to relocate him to Sanford, an idyllic hamlet that boasts the lowest crime rate in all of England. Left with no choice, Nicolas packs up his suitcase, the remnants of his dignity and a gargantuan houseplant ("it's a Japanese peace lily!") and departs for the countryside.
Once he arrives in Sanford, Nicolas discovers that small-town life isn't quite the same as the mean streets of London. The good people of Sanford are of a soft and fluffy persuasion; their biggest law enforcement concerns involve disputes over hedge trimmings and escaped swans. Needless to say, the local police department has grown a bit rusty - aside from Nicolas, the officers spend most of their time watching Keanu Reeves movies and having spontaneous ice cream parties.
The juxtaposition of a hard-boiled cop with the inane eccentricity of village life might make for a passable sitcom episode, but "Hot Fuzz" is good enough to spice things up by throwing a series of mysterious murders into the mix. Without warning, the citizens of Sanford begin to drop dead one by one, some in the most alarmingly grisly ways. Most of the town writes off the murders as a series of freak accidents, but Nicolas suspects foul play. So with the help of a bumbling fellow officer named Danny (Nick Frost), he sets out to track down the bad guy.
Lest I make the plot sound like some sort of unimaginative "Scream" rip-off, let me assure you that "Hot Fuzz" keeps its feet firmly planted in universe of dumb action movies. It doesn't take long for Nicolas's investigation to lead to a series of gunfights, explosions and car chases, all of which might have been unbearably tedious if the filmmakers' tongues hadn't been planted so resolutely in their cheeks. Simon Pegg (who co-wrote the screenplay with director Edgar Wright) understands that the action hero role doesn't require much alteration to enter into the realm of self-parody, and his performance is filled with enough winking declamations and tough-guy posturing to fill a dozen Steven Seagal movies.
Wright and Pegg's previous collaboration was the much-beloved "Shaun of the Dead," a film that took a genre ripe for lampoonery - the zombie movie - and turned it into an irreverent tribute. "Hot Fuzz" pulls off the same trick with the action genre, raiding the closets of everyone from Michael Bay to Martin Scorsese with a madcap glee. In-jokes and visual references are hurled onto the screen with willful irony, and if "Hot Fuzz" has a flaw it's that these high spirits occasionally give way to cheap sentiment; Nicolas's rough childhood led him to be a cop, that sort of thing. When it's not trying to justify its own silliness with lapses into sobriety, however, "Hot Fuzz" is exceptionally well paced - Wright does away with long expository set-ups and literally cuts to the chase, focusing solely on the action and the hilarity surrounding it.
"Hot Fuzz" takes an unexpected left turn in the third act, when Nicolas and Danny's discovery of a sinister conspiracy sets off a town-wide descent into madness. Suddenly a film that has spent an hour and a half parodying action movies becomes an action movie itself, as Nicolas leads a ragtag band of police officers in a battle royale against the town militia. Wright really goes for broke in the final showdown, with a gustiness that you sorta have to admire - Nicolas fires off rocket launchers, impales a man on a church spire, jump-kicks evil grandmothers in the face and so forth. It's nothing you didn't see at the multiplex last summer, but the whole thing is executed with such unrestrained verve that it's hard not to get caught up in the spirit of the thing.
And that's really the brilliance of "Hot Fuzz" - it's tightly constructed enough to succeed as an action film in its own right, yet contains such an abundance of ironic self-awareness that it functions as an affectionate mockery of the very same. The film is destined to be appreciated both by people who adore action movies and people who despise them; the former will love "Hot Fuzz" for its campy entertainment value, while the latter will nod in bitter appreciation every time Danny quotes another line from "Bad Boys II."
