Flick about English cops well-armed with laughs

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 20, 2007 at midnight

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The Shaun of the Dead gang returns to the big screen with Hot Fuzz, a movie that goes in two directions at the same time without ripping itself to shreds.

Last time, zombie movies came under the comic gaze of writer-director Edgar Wright and co-writer Simon Pegg. This time it's Agatha Christie mysteries and big-budget, Jerry Bruckheimer-style fare that are struck by the team's slings, arrows and outrageous genre affection. If you're into playing the comparison game, I'd say Shaun was funnier, but this edition of comic mayhem doesn't want for laughs, and it's based on an audaciously funny idea: bringing a ton of firepower to a small British village.

Pegg, who played the hapless Shaun, this time portrays Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a London cop banished to the countryside because his stellar arrest record tends to make his fellow officers look bad. They'd rather not expend Angel's kind of energy.

Angel's transfer produces the expected results: It seems you can take the cop out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the cop. Angel brings his no-nonsense ways to the small town of Sandford, where no one seems to take law enforcement seriously, especially the police.

Gradually, Nicholas becomes friends with a fellow police officer (Nick Frost, also of Shaun of the Dead) who ultimately tries to persuade him to lighten up. As it happens, Frost's Danny Butterman is the son of the village's chief cop, Inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent).

When Nicholas begins delving into a series of murders, the plot heads in a whole other direction. At that point, Hot Fuzz becomes an Americanized comedy, something along the lines of a spoof of movies such as Bad Boys II.

Wright pours on the firepower in willful pursuit of preposterous results. A ton of urban- cop violence lands smack in the middle of the placid English countryside. It's as if an army had invaded an old Ealing Studio comedy of the 1950s and attempted to blow it to smithereens.

The Shaun crew receives able support, notably from Broadbent, a fine actor in either the comic or serious mode, and Timothy Dalton, who proves surprisingly funny as a local businessman with an appallingly insincere smile.

At two hours, Hot Fuzz probably overstays its welcome, but there are enough laughs to make the movie a worthy successor to Shaun, and this one is no less outlandish: Rarely have we seen a British comedy in which the protagonists are armed to the teeth with both wit and automatic weapons.

Hot Fuzz

A hotshot cop arrives in the British countryside.