Hot Fuzz
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Timothy Dalton
Director: Edgar Wright
Anyone who has seen Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead will know what to expect from Hot Fuzz. Again we have two British lads, played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, indulging the trio's apparent love for second-rate Hollywood cinema by parodying another of its less challenging genres. In Shaun of the Dead , it was the zombie flicks of George A. Romero and others. In Hot Fuzz, the police action movie is exported to Britain as Sergeant Nick Angel is sent to a sleepy village because his success as a policeman in London is making the rest of the force look bad.
The town of Sandford is home to a law-abiding population and an underemployed bunch of policemen, led by Jim Broadbent (Bridget Jones's Diary, Gangs of New York), whose movie-addict son (Frost) sees Angel as something of a role model. Cue endless references to Hollywood action movies against a backdrop reminiscent of homegrown 1970s 'menacing village' cult favourites such as Straw Dogs and The Wicker Man. A good film for film buffs, then, but in its own right uneven and overlong.
Pegg - who looks more like an Icelandic social worker than London's top cop - is perhaps the least convincing of all the players, and that's saying something of a movie filled with well-known faces in unlikely character roles. A pool (in which Pegg and Frost, right, often do little more than tread water) of big British names, including Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy and Martin Freeman, appear early on in the film, and their absence thereafter - especially Coogan's - leaves quite a void. But they, at least, seem to be having a good time, from Timothy Dalton as the town's sinister supermarket owner to The Wicker Man's Edward Woodward as a Neighbourhood Watch CCTV specialist. This is self-indulgent filmmaking in the extreme, and while that may not be a bad thing, the in-jokes and obscure references are unlikely to please anyone as much as they did the filmmakers.