Hot Fuzz review

Comedians Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and their director partner Edgar Wright propelled themselves into the A-League of British comedy with Shaun of the Dead, and they return with the highly anticipated Hot Fuzz. It's something of a disappointment, certainly on the laughter scale, and its overlong running time suggests that the powers-that-be failed to exercise much caution in deciding what to leave on the cutting room floor.

Pegg stars as Sergeant Nicholas Angel, a London copper who lives for his job. He's by-the-book and he's good - so good in fact that he's making the rest of his colleagues look amateurish. His superiors - played by Bill Nighy and Steve Coogan - decide on emergency action, and Angel is reassigned to Sandford, the sleepiest of sleepy villages in the rural English countryside.

Soon he is cracking some of the village's toughest cases, including that of a missing swan, but he begins to suspect that beneath the WI-infused veneer, all may not be what it seems, as a series of strange and unexplained events are brushed aside as accidents. Meanwhile his dimwitted partner (Frost)assures him that nothing of note ever happens in the town.

Frost and Pegg always make an amiable screen pairing, but the film lacks the sense of credibility that made Shaun of the Dead such a success. Even though it seemed ludicrous, the three collaborators made it perfectly plausible that zombies were on the loose in Crouch End. Here, on the other hand, it seems that they are going for the laughs every time - easy and cheap or sometimes admittedly clever and funny - at the expense of anything approaching a compelling storyline. The plethora of famous faces (among them Bill Bailey, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Timothy Dalton) eke out what they can from largely one-dimensional characters, but there are swathes of the films that are largely laughter-free.

Wright's touch is stylish and assured, but an extremely bad editing choice has been made which sees nearly every scene bookended by fast cuts (highly reminiscent of similar sequences in Requiem for a Dream) which are funny the first couple of times, but which jar by the tenth and eleventh time we see them. There are also a series of false endings which see Frost and Pegg living out the kind of Resident Evil scenes which worked so well in Spaced (their superb comedy series), but here they appear rather forced and beside the point.

The film will inevitably play well to the army of fans that this team have deservedly accrued - but whether it will allow them to build that fanbase is unlikely.

Paul Hurley