British cop spoof from the team -- Edgar Wright, director and co-writer together with the star, Simon Pegg -- who brought you Shaun of the Dead, a zombie spoof. It constitutes neither an advance nor a reverse. It holds its ground. If the laughter tends to be spotty and unlusty, the labor is always energetic, conscientious, attentive to detail, limitedly resourceful. Pegg, with a head like a handball, small and hard and perfectly round, stays commendably in character as a stick-up-the-butt straight arrow (beverage of choice, on duty or off: cranberry juice) who has shamed his big-city colleagues with his four-hundred-percent higher arrest rate ("You can't be Sheriff of London!"), and has accordingly been reassigned to a cozy little hamlet that's "statistically" the safest place in the kingdom. (Telling detail: the completely bare Evidence Room at police headquarters.) The statistics, however, prove to be skewed by the peculiar policy of filing suspicious deaths under "accidents." A serial killer would seem to be afoot, and some of the slayings are sufficiently gruesome to kill the laughs, if any were struggling into existence. And the endless climaxes, down the homestretch, are extremely taxing even as a spoof of the action-film cliché of endless climaxes. Still, one wouldn't have wanted them to stop before the fistfight in the miniature village, an optical illusion of a literal Battle of the Titans, Godzilla-scale human figures in a kiddie theme park. Then again, one might have wanted them to stop, or turn aside, before the fistfight's gruesome conclusion. With Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine, Timothy Dalton. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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