Film: Hot Fuzz

Parodies generally make for hit and miss fun that passes ephemerally by. Whilst Airplane and Naked Gun managed to maintain an audience over the years it is unlikely that recent fodder like Scary Movie will be appearing anywhere other than late night repeats on lesser digital TV channels in future years. Therefore the quality and success of Shaun Of The Dead stood out like a talented individual in a Pop Idol final. To call it a cult parody would be to undermine both it mainstream success and the emotional heart and tight plotting at it's centre.

Hot Fuzz, the new film from Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, attempts to repeat the formula. This time the shallow but amusing premise is that a highly successful London based policeman is shunted out to a quiet country beat to stop him showing up the rest of the Metropolitan Police force. How will has hard-line urban approaching work in little England. Cue Bad Boys in a village near Bath.

Much of the cast of Shaun Of The Dead re-appear, including Nick Frost playing a markedly similar role to his previous character Ed. However the big difference is that Simon Pegg has abandoned his slacker persona to portray Britain's most effective cop. Choosing such an exceptional high flyer as the lead character makes it harder to empathize with the central story than in Shaun. Pegg's restrained acting suits the part, but it's like watching a talented footballer just playing short passes rather than attempting jaw-dropping through balls. It's only when the action cranks up in the final third that he employs his full comic range and the film lifts noticeably at this point.

Edgar Wright uses the fast cutting, amped up visual style that has served him so well and deploys it good effect, effectively taking classic Michael Bay and John Woo shots and giving them an absurd spin by way of the surroundings. His major achievement is managing to create scenes that are both adrenaline pumping and laugh out loud funny.

The cast is so ridiculously packed with stars it almost becomes a parody of it's parodic self as each minor character is taken by a starry cameo by the likes of Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan and Martin Freeman. However in the main supporting roles Timothy Dalton and Jim Broadbent are superb, with Dalton mugging more than a royal dalton factory and Broadbent underplaying to sublime effect.

The laughs in Hot Fuzz are frequent and hearty. The main comment it will attract is "it's not quite as good as Shaun Of The Dead", but since few films are half as good as that, we will gratefully receive one that is 90% as good.