Hot Fuzz

When the Brit RomZomCom Shaun of the Dead hit the States, it was a refreshingly informed riff on the zombie mythos, with a sly approach to the humor and character interaction. Continuing at you in the same vein, here our boys take on the slam-bam action of the buddy cop genre, exemplified by such Michael Bay fare as Bad Boys. After consistently putting his colleagues in a bad light with his super-cop ways, a London bobby is reassigned to a bucolic village. All seems perfectly normal at first, until random villagers begin to show up with their feet in the air … and limbs in other places. At times surprisingly more grisly than their zombie spoof, Hot Fuzz may still present some problems for an American audience, with accents thicker than a soccer thug’s head, and pacing that at first seems a bit restrained … that is, up until the final act when all Bruckheimer cuts loose. I enjoyed it, but came away still disappointed, and for some of the reasons that I loved Shaun of the Dead. While Shaun was driven by the narrative, with the pop-culture references were ornaments, in Hot Fuzz the references are the whole damned tree.