Bad Boys for Life | Hot Fuzz

Several years ago, Director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg collaborated on the zombie comedy cult classic Shaun of the Dead. The two team up once again for the British police comedy Hot Fuzz.

Pegg stars as super cop Nicholas Angel, an officer so gung ho he would put Robocop to shame. He ascends so quickly through the ranks of London’s Metropolitan Police Service that he is exiled to a new post because his arrest rate, which is 400 percent higher than everyone else’s, is making his superiors look bad.

To teach the overeager cop a lesson, he is sent to a distant outpost in the country, Sandford. To say that Angel encounters a culture shock would be to put it lightly. The town has virtually no crime and hasn’t had a murder in more than 20 years.

Angel is paired with the stocky son of the police chief, Danny Butterman (the funny Nick Frost) who is a huge fan of police movies but has no actual police experience. Suddenly, people start dropping dead, and everyone seems to think they’re all accidents. But Angel is suspicious, and soon he and his mismatched partner have to solve the strange ongoing occurrences in “Stepford Sandford.”

Much like their earlier film, Shaun of the Dead, this film features a British comic sensibility, which many people will either love or despise. Wright’s work successfully blends dark elements while managing to keep the tone light. His trailer for the fake film, Don’t, which appeared in Grindhouse, is another example of Wright’s twisted comedic sensibility.

Pegg and Frost, who also starred together in “Shaun,” reunite once again in similar roles. Pegg is the film’s straight man, allowing the humorous Frost to let go, comedically. “Is there a place in a man’s head that you can shoot to make it explode?” the perplexed Butterman asks while Angel is giving a safety lecture to a group of students.

Paying homage to police buddy films such as Bad Boys and Point Break, our British Boys begin slow, but by the film’s conclusion they bring the noise – in a major way! Though as not uproariously funny as Wild Hogs or Blades of Glory, its humor is much more understated, yet effective. Will Smith said it best for our talented police duo, “They ride together, they die together. Bad boys for life.”

This review also appeared on BET.com.