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It’s been a week since I saw Hot Fuzz, but other priorities interfered with my writing a review until now. And I’m not entirely certain that writing a review of it is a good thing, not because it’s bad (it isn’t), but because trying to describe why it’s funny is damn near impossible. It’s from the same creative team as Shaun Of The Dead-- co-writer/director Edgar Wright, co-writer and star Simon Pegg, and co-star Nick Frost-- and while the two films differ substantially in setting and storyline, they share a certain skewed comic sensibility. But where Shaun dealt with the previously unnoticed similarity between English pub crawlers and flesh-eating zombies, Hot Fuzz takes on two much larger targets-- the over-the-top Jerry Bruckheimer action spectacle, and the evil-beneath-the-surface-in-a-small-town plot that’s become overly familiar in the years since Blue Velvet’s severed ears and laughing-gas-huffing psychopaths.

The plot: Nicholas Angel (Pegg) has a higher arrest record than any other London police officer, so naturally he’s resented by his colleagues and superiors and ends up getting transferred to the apparently bucolic rural village of Sandford. Though his uptight, officious behavior initially gets on everyone’s nerves, he soon teams up with local cop Danny Butterman (Frost), son of the police chief and action movie obsessive extraordinaire. Danny peppers Nicholas with annoying questions, even when they’re giving a presentation to a local school class (“Is it true that there’s a place in a man’s head that, if you shoot it, it will blow up?”), and is disappointed when it turns out Nicholas has never fired off two guns at once while leaping through the air. At first, they investigate minor incidents such as a lost goose; but then people start turning up dead, all apparently by accident, and Nicholas suspects something more sinister.

The comic rhythms of Hot Fuzz are hard to describe; it moves at its own eccentric pace, and much of the fun is to be found in the odd timing of the dialogue, and the way Pegg and Frost develop their characters through small accumulations of detail before the big action set-piece that wraps up the story. Wright and Pegg clearly have an affection for the material they’re satirizing, and so Hot Fuzz is simultaneously a send-up and a homage to buddy action films, British cop dramas, and horror movies (some of the deaths would seem unbearably gruesome if they were in a serious film, but aren’t especially shocking in this context). It doesn’t always get the balance right-- I thought it telegraphed the identity of its main villain way too early (though there’s still a surprise late in the game, when a character who seemed good turns out to be very, very bad), and in some ways that action finale was a little too close to Bruckheimerian overload for comfort. But even then, there are funny lines-- Danny chides Nicholas for missing the perfect opportunity for an action-hero quip-- and on the whole, it’s a very funny film.

Rating: 8/10.