Hot Fuzz

This teasing genre-homage comes from the English trio responsible for 2004’s teasing genre-homage Shaun of the Dead—it too was directed by Edgar Wright from a script by Wright and Simon Pegg, who stars with Nick Frost. But instead of zombie movies, Hot Fuzz gorges on the conventions of mundane cop-centric action flicks, sending them up with fond abandon and much hilarity. Pegg plays a Type-A London supercop whose dallying superiors banish him to a sleepy suburb, where he sniffs out something funny—both ha-ha and strange—about the status quo and, with help from a tubby, cop-movie-happy sidekick (Frost), brings the justice. It’s overlong and not always precisely on target but neither self-congratulating nor condescending—and a fine, funny contribution to English-American mutual amusement besides. Next to Ricky Gervais’ cable-network comedies of self-mortification, the Wright-Pegg-Frost mode of disarmingly dorky badassery is the best thing going.