Bring It!This time, the genre of choice are cop movies, in particular the buddy cop heroics found in most big budget blockbusters. At it's core (and like most buddy cop movies), it's a love story between two men, who bond after a requisite amount of friction before determining that they are both after the same objective.
Hot Fuzz focuses on Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Pegg), a British officer who focuses his entire life around his job, losing his girlfriend and the respect of the force (His arrest record is 400% better than the rest of the department making everyone look bad). After a mandatory reassignment to the small village of Sandford, Angel quickly becomes a novelty of the town as his attempts to enforce the law are rebuked by the leaders of the small community. Partnering with Frank Butterman (Frost) the eager and impressionable son of the Police Chief, Angel discovers that the many "accidents" in the village are all linked and are in fact, a series of murders.
What comes next is the smartest homage for movie geeks that I've ever seen, with references to Point Break, Leon, Bad Boys II, Matrix Revolutions, Lost Highway, Lethal Weapon, Requiem For A Dream, The Wicker Man, The Omen and their own Shaun of the Dead, among others.
With a colorful cast including Edward Woodward, Paddy Constantine, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent, Paul Freeman, Stuart Wilson, the brilliant Timothy Dalton and uncredited appearances by Steve Coogan, Cate Blanchett and Peter Jackson, Hot Fuzz manages to find and utilize every other talented British thespian that isn't contracted to a Harry Potter film.
The creative team of Simon Pegg and co-writer/director Edgar Wright have accomplished what Grindhouse failed to do; make a love letter to the kinds of movies that they don't seem to make anymore, bordering the line between parody and dead seriousness and still make it entertaining and a damn good film to boot.
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