Pegg stars as Nicholas Angel, an elite London police officer, whose proficiency makes the rest of his team look bad, causing him to be re-assigned to a West Country village where a series of gruesome deaths take place.
Hot Fuzz is the second and most commercially successful film in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, succeeding Shaun of the Dead and followed by The World's End.
Principal photography took place in Wells, Somerset for eleven weeks and ten artists worked on VFX, which involved explosions, gory gunfire scenes and a flip book.
[6] Nicholas Angel, a recently promoted Metropolitan Police Sergeant, is reassigned to the rural town of Sandford, Gloucestershire, for being too exceptional.
Angel is frustrated by the village's mundanity, his and Frank’s incompetent colleagues, and the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance (NWA)'s prioritisation of low crime statistics over law enforcement.
That night, a cloaked figure attacks George Merchant, a wealthy land developer, in his home, and kills him in a gas explosion.
The NWA, led by Frank, reveals that they committed the murders and staged them as accidents because each victim threatened Sandford's chances of winning "Village of the Year."
Irene, Frank's late wife and Danny's mother, put everything into helping Sandford win the first-ever competition, but travellers moved in and ruined their chances the night before the adjudicators arrived, driving her to suicide.
Although initially leaving for London, Angel stops at a convenience store and takes heart after seeing a display of action-movie DVDs, turning around and returning to Sandford.
While the officers are reviewing the paperwork of the many arrests, Tom Weaver, the last NWA member, enters the station wielding a blunderbuss.
[16] In one interview Wright declared that he "wanted to make a title that really had very little meaning... like Lethal Weapon and Point Break and Executive Decision."
In the same interview, Pegg joked that many action films' titles "seem to be generated from two hats filled with adjectives and nouns and you just, 'Okay, that'll do.
[18] Stow-on-the-Wold was considered amongst others, but after being turned away, the company settled upon Wells in Somerset, Wright's hometown,[19] of which he has said "I love it but I also want to trash it".
[22] While shooting scenes in their uniforms, Pegg and Frost were often mistaken for genuine police officers and asked for directions by passers-by.
He smiles assuredly before jumping over four in a row (according to the DVD commentary, Pegg vaulted over three fences, and a stunt man did a back flip over the fourth).
Frost's characters (Danny in Hot Fuzz, Ed in Shaun of the Dead) have a liking for Cornetto ice cream.
[30] Pegg and Wright have referred to Hot Fuzz as being the second film in the "Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy", with Shaun of the Dead being the first and The World's End being the third.
"[34] The film also includes various references to The Wicker Man, in which Edward Woodward had played a policeman tough on law and order.
Visual effects supervisor Richard Briscoe revealed the rationale for using the large amounts of blood: "In many ways, the more extreme you make it, the more people know it is stylised and enjoy the humour inherent in how ridiculous it is.
Throughout the film, over seventy gunfight shots were digitally augmented; Briscoe's rationale for adding the additional effects was that "The town square shootout, for example, is full of extra little hits scattered throughout, so that it feels like our hero characters really do have it all going off, all around them.
[38] Wright and Frost held a panel at the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con to promote Hot Fuzz, which included preliminary footage and a question and answer session.
The website's consensus reads, "The brilliant minds behind Shaun of the Dead successfully take a shot at the buddy cop genre with Hot Fuzz.
[43] Olly Richards of Empire praised the chemistry between Pegg and Frost, saying: "After almost a decade together, they're clearly so comfortable in each other's presence that they feel no need to fight for the punchline, making them terrific company for two hours".
[48] In 2016, Empire magazine ranked Hot Fuzz 50th on their list of the 100 best British films, with their entry stating, "the second in their planned trilogy again nails the genre clichés, with everything from Point Break to Bad Boys II (both openly referenced) humorously homaged.
Elsewhere, the Scooby-Doo-meets-Scream mystery is peppered with Britain's finest talent, playing up the English small-town clichés to great effect in a brilliantly incongruous meeting of sleepy rural life and stabby violent action.
[54] The two-disc set contains the feature film with commentaries, outtakes, storyboards, deleted scenes, a making-of documentary, video blogs, featurettes, galleries, and some hidden easter eggs.
Other music from the film is a mix of 1960s and 1970s British rock (The Kinks, T. Rex, The Move, Sweet, The Troggs, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Cozy Powell, Dire Straits), new wave (Adam Ant, XTC) and a Glaswegian indie band (The Fratellis).
[59][60] The soundtrack album features dialogue extracts by Pegg, Frost, and other cast members, mostly embedded in the music tracks.