6. Hot Fuzz
Universal Pictures
What everyone thinks: Hot Fuzz is smart because it mocks action movies. The films in the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy main selling point is they're genre pastiches; Shaun Of The Dead is a "rom-com with zombies", Hot Fuzz transplants a Hollywood action movie to a quiet British village and The World's End is Doctor Who after one too many. The middle entry, Hot Fuzz (Blue), sees super-cop Nicholas Angel transferred to Sandford where he finds himself chasing swans, filing paperwork and solving a massive murder conspiracy. Surprisingly it's the middle one that takes the most time. With Danny, a film literate, but totally inexperienced PC at his side, the film delights in twisting all the genre conventions, particularly in its explosive final act.
The real reason it's good: There's so many in-jokes to pick up on. We're not at all saying Hot Fuzz
isn't good for being a spot-on parody, nor isn't it an illegitimate reason to like the film. However, if that's all you're taking from it you're really missing out. All three Cornetto films are so intricately plotted that pretty much every line and visual gag is actually setting up a much bigger pay-off later on. The World's End has the original bar crawl exactly mirroring the ink-tinged second attempt (right down to the relevance of the bar names) and Ed's plan for the next day at the start of Shaun Of The Dead is exactly what they do (just with alternative meanings). And Hot Fuzz... well Hot Fuzz takes it even further. Rewatching the film ten times doesn't mean you'll catch everything messrs Pegg and Wright have snuck in there. There's way too many to list here, so get watching that DVD.