Hot Fuzz: a bizarre cocktail of A-Team sensibilities and zombie movie guts

Hot Fuzz is an enjoyable, strange comedy from the cutting edge of the British film industry. The experience of watching this movie is like shoving an A-Team episode into a blender along with Army of Darkness and Faulty Towers. On the one hand, you have a film in which thousands upon thousands of rounds are fired (all in the last 20 minutes of a 2+ hour movie) and not a single person is killed. On the other hand, you have a series of sickeningly gruesome murders on-camera with enough CG blood to make the producers of 300 wince.

Why the two extremes? What is compelling enough about Zombie movie gore (in a comedy no less) to require its juxtaposition with a light-hearted storyline about the preservation of a quiet British village's reputation as peaceful and serene?

And, while I'm at it, the film does an admirable job showing the dangers of being consumed by the need for perfection in your work. Sergeant Angel of the Police Service (Police "force" being deemed vocabulary too aggressive for public sentiment) is by far the most interesting character in a movie with few interesting characters. Even then, he is well drawn in his need to separate good from evil and to preserve the public order. The film's message is clear: Angel's insufferable desire to preserve good and evil overrides the town council's shades of gray in attempting to preserve a more nebulous "common good" while overlooking infractions of the law. Even if Angel turns into a vigilante to accomplish this, the message remains. Interesting for a modern Europe who doesn't seem much interested in discussion of good and evil.