In Hot Fuzz, the hyper-perfect London cop Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is transferred to the tiny village of Sandford because his extraordinary arrest record makes other cops look bad. There he becomes concerned with a rash of "accidental" deaths, though everyone else shrugs him off. He befriends local cop Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the son of the chief inspector (Jim Broadbent), and together they uncover a sinister conspiracy. Amazingly, the film does not shy away from their homoerotic bond; there is no female love interest.
In the grand tradition of Jerry Bruckheimer, the film's final third unleashes an astonishing series of shootouts, chases, fights, leaps, sprints, struts and one-liners. (They even track down an errant swan.) Unlike Bruckheimer, however, Wright shoots these sequences with exactly the right mix of dazzle, clarity and parody.
Hot Fuzz also lines up an extraordinary who's-who of great British talent (only Helen Mirren's Jane Tennison is missing). In an early sequence, Angel is called in to speak to his superior officer (Martin Freeman), then the next officer up (Steve Coogan) and then the next (Bill Nighy). Wright knows the precise impact of these faces as they appear, and their considerable charisma feels correctly used. Indeed, every facet of this film finds its proper place. Rather than buckling under all those old cop movies, Hot Fuzz is more like the result of them.