Hands up, those of you who saw 2004’s zombie farce ‘‘Shaun of the Dead.’’ You know the drill: A comic British take on a lowbrow Hollywood genre — not quite Python-surreal, but smart and fast and playing by the rules while insisting on a sort of comfortable English shabbiness. Very funny, very cheeky, just gory enough.
Now apply that template and much of the key personnel to two-cop action flicks, add some warm Guinness, and — voila — ‘‘Hot Fuzz.’’ It’s to the ‘‘Lethal Weapon’’ movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.
Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script with director Edgar Wright, both ‘‘Shaun of the Dead’’ vets) is the best bobby in London — so annoyingly rule-conscious that his superiors pack him off to the countryside so he won’t make them look bad. Re-assigned to the sleepy town of Sandford, Angel spends his first evening ID-ing the lads down the pub and putting one particularly drunken lout in the tank. Bad news: the lout is Police Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), son of Chief Inspector Butterman (Jim Broadbent) and Nick’s new partner.
Nick’s a by-the-book martinet, Danny’s a wide-eyed blob, and the duo spend more time chasing down the vicar’s swan than pursuing suspects — all familiar comic territory, and thanks to whoever put the Kinks’ ‘‘Village Green’’ on the soundtrack. ‘‘Hot Fuzz’’ keeps things percolating, though, by introducing us to the townspeople, played by a roster of slumming British talent.
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There’s Broadbent, of course, and a one-time James Bond, Timothy Dalton, as a smarmy local retailer. Billie Whitelaw (Sam Beckett’s muse, if you’re keeping score) pops up as the publican’s wife. Look fast for Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan, Cate Blanchett, and ‘‘Lord of the Rings’’ director Peter Jackson as a homicidal Santa Claus. All keep admirably straight faces even when they’re losing their heads.
For it wouldn’t be a cozy English hamlet without a mad killer on the loose. Despite the big guns and stray bits of ultra-violence, ‘‘Hot Fuzz’’ has its heart in the garden-party whodunnits of yore (see 1946’s ‘‘Green for Danger,’’ just out on DVD, with its murders in a country hospital). At the same time, Danny knows Nick will never be a true crime-fighter without a few late-night screenings of ‘‘Bad Boys 2.’’ It’s a matter of balance, innit?
‘‘Hot Fuzz’’ is so disarming you forgive its lapses, like the handful of spurting-blood scenes that feel tonally wrong and on loan from ‘‘Shaun of the Dead.’’ The movie overstays its welcome, too, but just as the fun’s turning tedious, Pegg, Frost, and Wright say sod it all and deliver a grandstanding action climax, complete with exploding cars, slow-motion shotgun recoils, and pistol-packing parsons. It’s ‘‘Dirty Harry’’ in the Home Counties — macho action with a spot of tea — and it is blissfully silly.
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