Forget it, Nicholas. It's Sandford.
The absolute worst thing about seeing Hot Fuzz today was sitting through the trailers for Delta Farce and Balls of Fury. The best thing about it was the film itself, which was cracking good from top to bottom. Writer-director Edgar Wright and writer-actor Simon Pegg took their time coming up with a follow-up to 2004's Shaun of the Dead and with Hot Fuzz they have produced a real winner.
Pegg stars as Nicholas Angel, a driven, by-the-books officer whose superhuman crime-fighting efforts are overshadowing the rest of the London Metropolitan police force, so his superiors engineer a transfer for him to the sleepy hamlet of Sandford where the most pressing police action appears to be rounding up the local swan. Angel is reluctantly partnered up with Nick Frost's Danny Butterman, underachieving son of Sandford police inspector Jim Broadbent, whose primary motivation appears to be preserving "the greater good" at the expense of actually enforcing the laws. All is decidedly not what it seems, though, as Angel stumbles upon a series of bizarre "accidents" that lead him to uncover the secret behind why the local murder rate is low, yet the accident rate so high.
Hot Fuzz is a densely-written and deftly-directed action comedy, the kind that is fully aware of the conventions of the buddy cop genre and turns them on their head as much as it fulfills them. It also features some delicious cameos by Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy (as Angel's superiors in London who can't wait to get him out of their hair), an unrecognizable Cate Blanchett (as his fed-up ex-girlfriend) and Stephen Merchant (as the owner of the aforementioned swan), as well as a marvelous turn by Timothy Dalton as one of Sandford's most upstanding citizens, who has a way of saying the most cryptic (and seemingly incriminating) things before and after his fellow citizens' accidents. And for those who worry about missing Shaun's gleefully over-the-top violence, this film has plenty of that as well.
Between this film, Shaun and Don't, one of the pitch-perfect fake trailers in the middle of Grindhouse, Wright has carved out quite a niche as a director of clever, fast-paced and occasionally gruesome comedies. I'll take them over the likes of Balls of Fury any day.