‘Hot Fuzz’ is an incisive comedy which plays on all the movie clichés we have come to expect from action films, westerns, and cop dramas over the years, but then transplanting them to a sleepy Gloucestershire village (though filmed in Wells, Somerset) where all the mayhem and murders that we would expect in a film like ‘Point Break’ or ‘Bad Boys II’, both of which are referenced and re-appropriated here, would be par for the course. The most ingenious ingredient is in having former 007 Timothy Dalton in a substantial supporting role as the General Manager of the local Somerfield supermarket, bringing the villainy that he captured so well in ‘Rocketeer’ to a role that is heightened by its very prosaicness.

The big city cop who is forced into the suburbs makes for as quintessentially British a phenomenon as ‘Shaun of the Dead’, also directed by Edgar Wright and with the same team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Its appeal is in acknowledging that the audience will be familiar with the works of Michael Bay or Clint Eastwood, but transferring them to the sort of sleepy village familiar on the small screen from the likes of ‘Midsomer Murders’ or ‘Heartbeat’. But here the characters are flailing around, often drunk, ignorant or out of their depth to strictly emulate their Hollywood forebears.

And this is the appeal of ‘Hot Fuzz’ as it affectionately sends up the staples of the genre, though is also pretty effective in its use of explosions, bullets and grisly deaths at the hands of the Grim Reaper. It is not uncommon to see the likes of ‘Point Break’ or ‘Bad Boys II’ in the local supermarket on the DVD shelf, but in ‘Hot Fuzz’ the trajectories and characterizations from these films are played out in the supermarket itself, lending the film an element of both familiarity and alterity. Nick Angel (Pegg) is the Metropolitan policeman out of his depth in the village of Sandford, and it is only fitting that Edward Woodward who played the naïve policeman from the not dissimilarly themed ‘The Wicker Man’ should appear here in a contrasting role as the head of the vigilante Neighbourhood Watch organization.

The community, which is here presented as sinister and indeed murderous, is the glue that ties Sandford together, and, aside from Clint Eastwood’s Preacher in ‘Pale Rider’, who comes from the outside in order to protect a small town from being savaged by a mining company, Hollywood crime and action films are far more individualistic and family-centred. So, seeing Sergeant Angel riding on a white horse adorned with guns and explosives to rid Sandford of the powers of corruption is hilarious precisely because it doesn’t automatically fit this milieu.