Is it too cliched to say that the Boys are back in town? After the cult success that was Shaun of the Dead, a revisit to the world of comedy horror, director Edgar Wright and acting duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost team up for their second feature film, Hot Fuzz. And rather than mocking the genre of zombie flicks, this time the boys take on the cop thriller, and mildly disappoint.

Pegg plays Sergeant Nicholas Angel, the Golden Boy of the London Met, so good and so determined that he ends up making his co-workers look so bad in comparison, and so is quickly transferred to the quiet village of Sandford. Here we get our first batch of amusement as Angel has difficultly in transplanting his gung-ho policing methods and tactics to a sleepy village of farmers, dawdlers and cake-eating local coppers. The latter is epitomised by Officer Butterman (Frost), a bumbling plod whose obsession with wreckless Hollywood cop flicks like Point Break keeps him in a fantasy world outside of his daily job. But soon the heat rises in Sandford as several murders occur in a week, leaving Angel suspicious and determined to get to the bottom of a seeming conspiracy.

Hollywood cop films are an easy target for mocking, with spoofs such as Naked Gun and Loaded Weapon. And Hot Fuzz certainly joins the queue in taking a pot shot at its macho meanderings. For example, the snappy, hip-hop montage of police routines as seen in CSI or any Tony Scott movie and brought to their ridiculous conclusions as Angel fills out paperwork, scrawling date-of-births to the soundtrack of rock music and second-long shaky-cam cuts. And the film also brandishes its own type of surrealism (familiar to fans of the makers’ TV series, Spaced), with amusing moments such as the elderly folks of the village suddenly obtaining automatic firearms and unleashing hell upon our heroes. And Simon Pegg is utterly convincing as the hardened do-gooder action hero, suggesting that we’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the future.

But for all its good intentions, the film feels a little hollow. For one, it’s far too long, stretching to two hours to develop character traits that aren’t very important in a film that aims to mock its sources for inspiration. And therein lies the main problem with Hot Fuzz. If it is an attempt to highlight the ridiculous qualities of cop films, it spends most of its time playfully mimicking them. While the action scenes are silly, they’re just not silly enough. And there’s not enough reality in the film to contrast against the silliness, and at times Hot Fuzz feels just like those Hollywood cop flicks, becoming a pastiche instead of the parody I feel it would work better as.

That’s not to say the film isn’t completely unenjoyable. Like Shaun of the Dead, there are some genuinely hilarious moments (who couldn’t laugh at karate kicking a granny in the head, or a guns vs cutlery stand-off?). But just like Shaun of the Dead its the idea that drives the amusement, and often the execution lets itself down. In the end, Hot Fuzz wants it both ways, it wants to be a Hollywood cop film while trying to mocking it, and achieves neither.

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