The title of Hot Fuzz suggests a silly police action comedy that will appeal to teenagers and the sometimes mindless action-flick crowd, and the trailers do nothing to challenge that view. Surprisingly, nothing could be further from the truth. Director Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz is a funny, witty spoof on odd-couple police buddy movies that irreverently imposes American-style violence on British country folk while taking a good poke at sleepy little English villages that hide their nastier sides.

Sergeant Nicholas Angel -- played by Simon Pegg, who cowrote the film with Wright -- is a supercop, one of London’s finest. Angel has trained himself to be ever vigilant by enrolling in every training course and volunteering for every dangerous assignment, for years has maintained the highest arrest record in Britain, and is the most decorated cop on the force. But because he makes everyone else look bad, one day Angel’s superiors "reward" him with a transfer to Sandford, a sleepy little country village that hasn’t seen a murder in over 20 years.

Reluctantly, Angel relocates to Sandford, to be met by its charming people, its unnecessary and inept police force, and its total lack of policing activities. To his chagrin, the loner is assigned a partner, Public Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the affable son of the local police chief, Inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent). PC Butterman sees Angel as his entrée to the exciting world of big-city policing, with its gunfights and car chases and confrontations with dangerous criminals, and does his best to bond with Angel.

Not soon after Angel arrives, peaceful Sandford is beset by a series of murders that the Sandford police readily interpret as accidents. Unable to convince them that this is the work of a serial murderer, Angel finds himself in conflict with his own well-meaning but incompetent colleagues to hunt down the killer.

Pegg and Wright had a success with the script for the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (which Wright also wrote and Pegg also starred in), and in Hot Fuzz they’ve crafted another screenplay that is engaging and original, despite its many references to and mimickings of scenes from other films, especially Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991) and Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II (2003). No doubt the attentive viewer will discover many other references to famous action films.

Hot Fuzz could easily have failed had it not been for the high production values and the skill of the actors, who play their roles with just the right amount of seriousness -- these characters never betray the fact that they are in a comedy. (When actors let on that they’re in on the joke, it’s no longer funny.) Hot Fuzz also works because the fictional Sandford, a quaint village of old stone buildings and a long history of peace and stability, makes a nice contrast to the abandoned lots, deserted warehouses, and mean streets of America -- the usual settings of the assault tactics Angel employs.

Director Pegg and co-screenwriter Wright clearly have gotten the respect of the British film industry, judging from the several prominent British actors who agreed to participate in this risky comedy -- Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward, Bill Nighy, and Jim Broadbent -- along with Australian actress Cate Blanchett. Considering the outcome, the cast made a wise choice.

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