Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s cop-film parody follow-up to Shaun of the Dead, is odd bird. Exhibiting a recent trend in postmodern comedy that ranges from television series like Family Guy and The Simpsons to feature films like Shaun of the Dead, both of Wright and Pegg’s films have not so much skewered the conventions and sources of their references so much as emulated those conventions and sources with an affectionately knowing, chiding attitude. While Hot Fuzz does poke fun at taking all-too-adept London cop Nicholas Angel (co-writer Pegg) out of the big city and depositing him in a country village inside a useless police force (and partnered with Nick Frost’s daft police officer), satire is mostly hard to come by. Instead, Edgar Wright directs a film that is almost exactly like a smaller-scale version of the cop films and action movies Frost’s action-hungry officer loves, starting off with stifled character traits (the big city cop infuriated at the laxity and carelessness of the small town gig) and gradually seeing a larger plot behind it all, finally warranting bringing out the big guns and the car chases. It is all done tongue-in-cheek of course, and the comedy is, like in Shaun of the Dead as spot on in its use of plot devices and genre conventions for sly purposes as it is in gags and comedy mostly unrelated to the genre parody. (A prime example is perhaps the funniest scene in the film, where Angel has to tell his ex, who is a forensics analyst in the middle of a crime scene, that he is moving to the countryside. Wright and Pegg’s hand at comedy is proved by the laughs earned simply from gags about the masked forensics team and Pegg’s spot on deadpan performance.)

Nevertheless, for all the constant, if somewhat muted comedy, the feeling of the is very…odd, because for all its humor the movie is essentially playing it straight, and not in the Dr. Strangelove sense of reality being so absurd as to be comedic. Even Pegg, a very talented comedic performer in his own right, gives himself an essentially unfunny character as the straight man protagonist. But Hot Fuzz is smarter than its recent Family Guy and The Simpsons brethren, because the faulty parodies of those shows operate entirely on a level of recognition for the audience, a sense of “oooh, it’s like just like that movie, only Stewie Griffin is doing it.” The joke, if one can call it that, is simply the idea of a reference transposed to different setting, and not a satiric re-imagining but rather a transplant. There is very little incisive humor or longevity in such gags. At first, it seems like the Wright/Pegg collaborations are doing the same thing, albeit with a better sense of humor, a bit more winking, and much less derivativeness. It certainly is initially disappointing that, say, the final shootout of Hot Fuzz really isn’t funny because the writers do not satirize the ridiculousness of action movies; that the joke is that the movie is finally giving into its cop movie dictated conventions, replete with lousily shot action (with flashes of white, sped up footage, and slow motion) rather than actively undercutting these clichés.

But believe it or not there is an undercurrent of criticism going on beneath the film’s strange parody, a parody that likes its sources so much that the movie almost turns into an homage. The content of the plot is about a traditional and conservative town that goes to great, murderous lengths to keep itself just that, and Nicholas Angel’s big city style of law enforcement and sense of right and wrong get in their way. Angel’s suspicions that accidents in the town are actually murder (perhaps committed by the all-too-suave Timothy Dalton), and the awe-struck Frost’s growing admiration, friendship, and attraction to Angel prompt the duo to forget the “real” police rules and go grab the guns and wreck havoc on the township. There is a most subtle irony going on here, and its located exactly in that uneasy place where Hot Fuzz’s parody blends with its desire to actually be an action film. Nicholas Angel’s guidebook-dictating officer, who corrects people about calling it the police service and not the police force (force sounds too violent), an offhand reference to fascism, the small town’s widespread public surveillance, and the lack of crime in this model village serving as a secret bastion of murderous totalitarianism kept under the guide of old-fashioned rural community—all point to the existence (rendered ridiculous but very active in the film) of a sinister, violent underbelly that churns beneath the placid, peaceful surface of British society, and specifically small-town country life. By tackling the action genre, an almost inevitably fascist set of plot conventions and violent spectacle, and playing by its rules to turn its hero upon its own value system of vigilante justice meted out “for the greater good is a thing of subtle genius, and while Shaun of the Dead may be a funnier and more clever film parody, Hot Fuzz moves beyond that film’s satire of modern suburban life into something that looks startling like ideological critique. Like Shaun, the film ends happily until one realizes that not much as changed at all. The joke is that Hot Fuzz really is an action policier and that it never takes its humor so over-the-top that it would subvert the conventions it laughs at; that it looks like, works like, and is what it seems to be mocking. The joke is that amongst all the smaller jokes, the movie is actually quite straight, and its resolution would be downright disturbing if it weren’t couched both in the terms of a parody and of a typical resolution to a typical movie. It is an inspired and borderline confounding strategy of both humor and politics, and I’m not sure it works well at either. But the mixture is odd, very funny, and certainly, smartly, knows its movies.