Jen and I decided to make this our Valentine movie. We were originally going to do Music & Lyrics, but this looked like a blast so we gave it a go.
The movie tells the story of Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), ace cop in the London Metropolitan Police force, who is reassigned to the sleepy Gloucestershire village of Sandford. Here, Angel soon gets stuck in to the local crime (or lack thereof), but things soon become suspicious when, one by one, people start to suffer horrendous “accidents”, which soon set Angel’s spidey-sense tingling, as he takes it upon himself to investigate, with the hindrance of his new partner, the partially-brained Danny (Nick Frost). The investigation is tough as he gets to grips with the odd collection of villagers, and soon Angel begins to question his own sanity, as did the policeman he replaced, who lost his mind with fatal consequences…
The first thing of note is how great the cast is, a wide selection of well-known faces make cameo or greater roles, from Steve Coogan to Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton and Edward Woodward, all give entertainingly quirky performances, which work brilliantly against Pegg’s straightlaced Angel. On top of this some top-class direction keeps the story moving at pace, and there was only perhaps once in the movie when I thought that it could have been edited more tightly. This is a minor comment really because the script is so loaded with gags of every kind that I was really too busy laughing to notice such things. And much of the laughing was the genuine belly laughs that are hard to come by, particularly with such regularity in a movie. Many times I was still chuckling about a previous gag when the next joke came along, a sign of a very funny movie. Loads of references to the movies that it parodies \ homages, it competently manages to take off everything from Midsomer Murders to Die Hard and everything in between.
In the thick of this, it’s Pegg and Frost who really make this movie work, as genuinely likeable and completely unbelievable action heroes, such that even though we aren’t supposed to take the film seriously, we were still cheering them to the end.
If you haven’t got it by now - I loved this movie, and if I could go watch it again today I would, because I’m sure that I would still laugh more at this on the second, third or fourth viewing than I would most so-called comedies that arrive on the big screen. As far as I’m concerned, if you can only go see one movie this year, see Hot Fuzz. Spiderman and Pirates will no doubt take more at the box office, but they won’t be as entertaining as this.
