Jennifer Fallon - the Official Site

Nobody does satire quite like the Brits and when it comes to spoofing American films, writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, who also gave us Sean of the Dead, have nailed it.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around supercop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), promoted and transferred from the London Metropolitan Police to the sleepy village of Sanford, for the sin of being too efficient and making all the other cops in London look bad. When he gets to the West Country village, a series of seemingly random accidents makes him suspicious and together with his clueless partner, Danny (Nick Frost), he sets about to expose the evil underbelly of this most perfect of little villages—so perfect in fact, that it keeps winning the Village of the Year award.

You know you’re in for a laugh in the opening scenes, where, after a quick précis of Nicholas’s stellar career, he has to break it to his ex-girlfriend at a crime scene, that he’s leaving town.

Pegg’s deadpan delivery is the perfect foil for the idiocy of this film, which rambles on for the first hour or so, setting the scene for the final twenty minutes, which redefines the meaning of mayhem. Poking fun at everything from Cluedo to Bad Boys II and Point Break, every cop buddy film ever made, every ludicrous shoot-out Hollywood has ever thought up, not to mention a splash of mystery, a touch of horror, a really enthusiastic Neighbourhood Watch, this movie still managed to come up with the best motive for murder I’ve ever heard.

Peppered with well known British actors, including Bill Nighy, Timothy Dalton, Jim Broadbent, Martin Freeman and Edward Woodward, this is one of those films where you wonder if it’s legal to pay people having so much fun. I was laughing so hard toward the end, I may have to go back and watch it again to get all the lines I missed the first time.

Still, it’s hard to say too much about this film without giving the laughs away. The humour, particularly in the early part of the film, slips past you before you know it’s happening, and you find yourself laughing over the line of a few minutes ago, rather than the one you’re listening to now. The film is silly, the final shoot-out quite ludicrous, the end of the deliciously slimy bad dude is hysterical, the whole premise quite ridiculous, and the overall feel of the movies was like a long, big-budget episode of The Goodies.

Having said that, fifteen minutes after we left the cinema, we were still laughing. Now that’s entertainment.