Click to watch

Trailer for "Hot Fuzz"

There’s a variety of parody that makes fun of a genre’s conventions by re-enacting them in an absurd setting. Hence The Terror of Tiny Town, the infamous all-midget Western; Bugsy Malone, a gangster movie with a pre-teen cast; or segments of a few thousand animated films. The British comedy Hot Fuzz tries to do this with the Joel Silver variety of louder-faster-dumber cop movies, with a story that takes place in a sleepy British town. It comes from the crew that gave the world Shaun of the Dead, in which some London pub layabouts faced a plague of zombies. The two movies share the same problem: At a point, they stop being parodies of a genre and turn into an example of the genre itself. And despite their comic abilities, star Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, who also co-wrote the film, simply have lousy taste in movies. Their main touchpoints are Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent gone undercover to infiltrate an gang of bank-robbing surfers, and Bad Boys 2, with Will Smith and Martin Laurence. As a lifelong Anglophile, I have to tell you that it’s embarrassing watching Brits doing homages to such crap, whose action scenes were already recycled from dozens of other movies. As far as cop comedies go, you’d do better with Super Troopers, Reno 911, or even most any Police Academy sequel.