Hot Fuzz

Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz builds its genre joke on actual legwork. While writing, Wright and Simon Pegg watched a hundred and thirty eight cop films and sat down with more than fifty serving police officers, and the collision of those two sources is the whole engine of the comedy, since village paperwork and the rhythm of American action cinema end up inside the same edit. Editor Chris Dickens puts the film at over five thousand five hundred cuts. That is a blockbuster cutting rate applied to filing reports and a parish fete, so if fast editing wears you down, the opening hour will feel relentless rather than funny. Shooting took place in Wells in Somerset, Wright’s hometown, where the five hundred year old cathedral was digitally erased from shots because the invented town of Sandford needed a plainer church at its centre. Peter Jackson turns up uncredited as a deranged man dressed as Father Christmas. A good fit if you want an hour of procedure set up seriously and then cashed in as a gunfight across the last half hour. Not a fit if you tend to abandon a comedy that feels slow early on, because everything here is deferred payment and none of it arrives before the town hall.