• Hot Fuzz photo shoot • Review • Stills

"No one has ever represented the British police officer, the Bobby, as being a protagonist or even being a positive figure," observes Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script for Hot Fuzz, and stars as the anally retentive, over-achieving London Metropolitan Sergeant Nicholas Angel. "Usually, they were in the background to be shot or to pick up nickels as they lift up the tape for the detectives to go under."

The notion of a British police patrolman as positive protagonist had pretty much escaped celluloid representation until scriptwriter/director Edgar Wright and partner-in-crime Pegg decided to transform the steady Bobby into a Badass Cop. The idea for Hot Fuzz fell into place soon after 2004's Shaun of the Dead wrapped. "It was something I have always had an ambition to do," says Wright. "I have always been a huge cop movie fan and there isn't any tradition of them in the U.K. whatsoever. There hasn't been a cop film for thirty years and even before that there is only a handful."

But Hot Fuzz is no carbon copy of its bullet-pumping American counterparts. While there are no shortage of explosions, spinning heel-kicks, and falling magazine clips in the film's walloping climax, Hot Fuzz is also firmly rooted in the tradition of the English comedy of manners. The result is something of riotous blend of Bad Boys II and The Vicar of Dibley. Due to his outstanding track record of arrests ("You've been making us all look bad!"), Nick Angel, a tough as nails copper with the London service, is "re-assigned" to the sedate English country town of Sandford where the highlights of the week include the Sunday church get together and capturing the village's evasive swan. But then he meets bumbling PC Butterman (Nick Frost) and the two are thrown into high gear when a string of uncanny "accidents" befall the sleepy hamlet. The idea of a tribute to over-caffeinated action cinema set in a tiny town as the central conceit is not to be understood simply as a spoof. "We like to think of [our films] as funny genre films," Wright argues. "They are not so much in the line of Mel Brooks or the Zucker brothers [but] in a weird way probably more in line with [the tone of] Grindhouse, being a genre film that is funny."