Hot Fuzz Is One of the Best Action Movies Ever, and It's on Netflix

An Edgar Wright movie is instantly unmistakeable: He folds jokes, ADHD-infused editing, and innumerable loving pastiches into his films. Not a single frame or line of dialogue is frivolous. (And here, it’s easy to guess why he and Marvel Studios broke up long before he was able to realize his vision for Ant-Man.)

Since his film debut in 2004 with the horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead, Wright has helmed just four more films, including his first (and only) adaptation in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and last year’s triumphant quasi-musical Baby Driver. As sublime as his record is so far, his best remains Hot Fuzz, the second film in his “Blood and Ice Cream” trilogy. It’s streaming on Netflix right now, and you’d be a fool not to watch (or rewatch).

Hot Fuzz follows Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) of the London Metropolitan Police Service, who is so good at his job that his superiors deem it necessary to relocate him to the English countryside, for fear of his individual accomplishments eclipsing the mission of the force as a whole. Angel is dumped unceremoniously into a small village called Sandford, a seemingly idyllic rural town in which the day-to-day police work mostly involves giving directions to bemused tourists, investigating some illegally-trimmed hedgerows, and chasing down a lost swan from a local farm. Stifled by his cheerfully oblivious Inspector, Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent) and the Inspector’s fuck-up policeman son, Danny (Nick Frost, of course), Angel finds himself a fish out of water in the slow-paced Eden of Sandford.

Until people start dying and don’t stop dying.

Suddenly, the people of Sandford are being dispatched with ruthless and gory efficiency by a mysterious entity in a hooded cloak. We know this, and of course it doesn’t take Angel long to suspect a pattern (we’re told time and time again Sandford hasn’t experienced a recorded murder in 20 years), but the rest of the town’s police force and its inhabitants balk at the idea of a serial killer on the loose, especially with the Village of the Year competition coming up. To that end, Angel forms a close alliance with Danny, a connoisseur of American action movies who one day yearns to “jump through the air while firing two guns and going ‘Aaaaaaaah!'”

Even Hot Fuzz‘s name itself provides a clue to Wright’s more expanded ambitions. Where Shaun of the Dead was more of a straight parody of the hammer horror zombie movies of lore, Hot Fuzz doesn’t tie itself so inextricably to any one source. It’s Bad Boys by way of The Wicker Man by way of Miss Marple, a pitch-perfect homage to both the kinetic action movies from across the pond and the ever-so-British genre mainstay of small-town slaughter. The killings are brutal (more so than you’re probably expecting, even now), the jokes countless, and the cast jam-packed with a murderer’s row (sorry) of great British actors, including the flawless Olivia Coleman as PC Thatcher—a dispensary of absolutely filthy Carry-On caliber double entendres—and the ingeniously cast Timothy Dalton as a sneering, secretive grocery store mogul.

Pegg himself excels in a more thankless straight-man role than he’s ever been tasked with before (or since), and his antagonistic relationship with Sandford’s lead detectives (Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall) is miraculously a highlight within what is already a highlight reel of a movie. This is, of course, a buddy cop action movie (above all the other genres Wright and Pegg–the film’s co-writer–throw into the mix), and Frost’s Danny Butterman embraces the increasingly violent chaos with uninhibited glee. Raised on a diet of films such as Bad Boys 2 and Point Break, Danny’s greatest dreams are realized when the bodies start stacking up. This isn’t just one of the best action movie parodies of all time: it’s one of the best action movies of all time.

Wright will always hold a special place in the pantheon of crowd-pleasing auteurs, and, even considering his weakest works are still, at absolute least, very good, it’s a testament to Hot Fuzz that it will probably never be displaced as his finest, funniest movie.