Hot Fuzz

***Note***

No spoilers this time

***EndNote***

This quirky British comedy, brought to you by the writers and director of Shaun of the Dead, is certainly the most entertaining and funniest film of the year thus far. Where Shaun poked fun at horror, Hot Fuzz takes aim at the action.

Sgt. Angel (Simon Pegg) is a model police officer, but his job takes over every aspect of his life. When he is reassigned to Sanford, the village with the lowest crime rate in England, his over-zealous attitude causes problems for his new boss, co-workers including his naïve partner Danny (Nick Frost) and the villagers. As Angel begins to investigate crimes in his new village, he finds that things aren’t always as they seem.

The director, Edgar Wright, hits all the marks of a typical cop movie: an overly ambitious officer, the bumbling sidekick, the hard-ass detectives, a car chase, a huge explosion and a Mexican standoff, it’s all there. It’s also similar to an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with a series of short sketches tied together by absurd segues.

The two lead actors, Pegg and Frost, have excellent chemistry together which makes their performance all the better. The cast of secondary actors, like Timothy Dalton, Bill Nighy, Martin Freeman and Jim Broadbent, was terrific as well.

There wasn’t anything to complain about this movie except for the two hour run time. There were several secondary stories about the crimes of the village that were funny but could have been removed to speed up the movie.

There were a few jokes for the Shaun fans (the garden fence jumping scene, the various pub scenes and some of the dialog) though these references are funny in their own right and don’t require knowledge of the previous film.

This really has been the best film that I have seen this year, so I’m going to give it an 8/10 or four out of five stars.