Hot Fuzz

"Hot Fuzz" (Edgar Wright, 2007) Clever, but not really laugh-out-loud funny comedy from the makers of "Shaun of the Dead." Simon Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a metro cop so good that he is busted to the idyllic small town of Sandford in Gloucestershire.

That's a funny concept right there: what if you took the highly testosteroned and heavily armed cops of American movies and put them in a sleepy little town? Two things would happen: he'd begin to bust the petty crimes in such an over-the-top fashion that'd he'd cause a ruckus, or there really would be something rotten deep to the core of the town that only Angel's uber-dedication could ferret out.

Well, "Hot Fuzz" runs two hours so it's both. But that two hours is also part of the gag (singular). The film-makers stage the relatively minor showdowns with the same orgiastic verve as American action films—several cameras rolling at once and an editing style that extends the scene from every angle to an impossible length, complete with slo-mo fire-balls and not-anticipated consequences to the masonry around town. A little of that goes a long way, but a lot of it...tends to get monotonous. There's only so many times you can laugh at the shooting in slo-mo mid-leap before you start to ask "So, uh...can you do anything else?"