Hot Fuzz
One line review: More Shawn please.
Hot Fuzz is the next film the the people who made Shawn of the Dead. Instead of parodying a zombie film, this time they are taking on the action movie. Unfortunately, I don't think they managed to do as good a job as they did with Shawn of the Dead. That said, Hot Fuzz is still a pretty funny movie.
Hot Fuzz tells the story of Sergeant Nicholas Angel, a super cop from London. As Angel was such an perfect cop, he was making his fellow officers look bad. Thus the London police ship him off to a small town. A series of strange deaths in the town lead Angel to suspect that there is something bad going on, even though his fellow officers don't suspect anything.
So why doesn't Hot Fuzz work as well as Shawn of the Dead? I think that the basic story of Hot Fuzz is not particularly interesting. An action movie is only as good as the bad guy. Consider the villains from Die Hard, Leon, or Hard Boiled. There is no mystery as to who the bad guys are. In fact, not only are they known, they have been shown to be highly effective. The mystery, if there is one, is not who they are, but what exactly their motives are. The bad guys need to be a threat, not a joke. In Hot Fuzz the bad guys are mysterious figures that run around in black monk's robes. Not particularly menacing.
It is interesting because I thought that they spent a little too much effort in Shawn of the Dead on the story, especially in the relationship between Shawn and his step-father. To me those scenes stuck out in a odd way and in some sense unbalanced the film.
Finally I also found some of the film making annoying. They hyper-editing and accompanying loud noises were jarring and unnecessary.