"As soon as we subdue this shrubbery, we'll move on to the villains."

Grab your coolest shades, your favorite gun and your best mate – you know, the one who’s always got your back – and get yourself to a theater.* Hot Fuzz is here and it’s an action movie that plays by its own rules.

Actually, Hot Fuzz doesn’t so much play by its own rules as take the rules of a typical action movie to their logical extreme by applying them where they don’t seem to belong: a sleepy little village in the English countryside. The movie, from the creative team behind romantic-comedy-with-zombies Shaun of the Dead, stars Simon Pegg  as Nicholas Angel, a straight-arrow London cop whose impressive arrest record gets him banished to the small town of Sandford by jealous colleagues. Partnered with Danny (Nick Frost), the amiable but dim son of the local police chief, Nick seethes at what passes for police work in Sandford until a series of suspicious deaths sets his investigative antenna twitching. Are these just accidents as his complacent co-workers insist? Or is there a serial killer on the loose?

He's like a one-man band of mayhem.

As they did with Shaun, co-writers Pegg and Edgar Wright (Wright also directs) take a familiar genre and put their own reverently ridiculous spin on it, making it all fun and twisty and new again. Specifically referencing Bad Boys II and Point Break, Hot Fuzz is both spoofing and paying homage to the type of action movie that often has Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay’s name attached, the kind where a couple of ultra-macho, loose-cannon tough guys demonstrate their deep affection for one another by causing mayhem together in the name of justice. (My point here is undermined by the fact that half of the buddy-team in Point Break was actually a criminal. I wish I didn’t know that.)

Hot Fuzz works for me pretty much all the way through and on a number of levels. I like the first half of the movie where uptight Nick and good-natured Danny get to know each other, bonding over paperwork and Keanu Reeves movies. I like the colorful characters populating Sandford. I like Wright’s directing style, his visual puns and impeccable comic timing. I like that it’s a satire built around characters rather than a scattershot series of jokes like an Airplane movie. And I really enjoy the way the script builds slowly and absurdly to the wildly violent mayhem of its conclusion. And if it’s not quite as sharp or as funny as Shaun of the Dead, well, few things are.

"I'm sorry, Simon, you're too funny. It's making the rest of us look bad. I'm afraid you'll have to go."

I’ve heard a few reviews of Hot Fuzz from critics who can’t seem to enjoy it because it doesn’t make enough fun of the genre. Is it a satire of an action movie or an actual action movie?  Well, I don’t see why the filmmakers have to choose. I think it’s possible to have affection for something and still recognize its absurdities and clichés. (The list of things I feel this way about would include Star Trek, Harry Potter and myself.) Look, I’m not a particular fan of the action genre, but by the time Nick unleashed his inner Bad Boy I was right there with him.

* For the record, no, you really shouldn’t bring a gun to a movie theater. Or shades for that matter. You want to see what’s going on, don’t you?

Gorilla Pants rating: 3 out of 4 bananas