Two and 1/2 Stars

"Hot Fuzz" is a distinctly British-flavored lampooning of overblown, testosterone-driven, American buddy-cop movies. It is brought to theatres by the comedic talents behind "Shaun of the Dead," Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.

This time out, Pegg plays Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a high-octane London supercop. Angel is so hyper-efficient in his work and so driven to eradicate crime and criminals, he puts the rest of the police force to shame.

Angel makes his peers look so bad, he's given a promotion. (Actually, it's more of an exile, because all of his superiors and colleagues are exhausted by his perfectionism.) His new beat ends up being miles away from London, in a sleepy little village named Sandford.

Sandford is to England what Mayberry is to North Carolina. As the genial chief of police (Jim Broadbent) points out to a crestfallen Angel upon his arrival, "There are no arrests in Sandford because there is no crime in Sandford."

Assigned the chief's son, Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), as his partner and mentor on all things Sandford, Angel soon learns that police work in this bucolic village consists of chasing underaged teens out of pubs, stopping at the local grocer's for ice cream and knowing all of the locals by name.

The high-powered, hyperbolic escapades Angel experienced in London are a distant memory to him and only experienced vicariously by Danny when he watches his extensive collection of DVDs. Angel's own super-proficiency as a police officer and hot-shot reputation are even called into question by Sandford's two snarky detectives (Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall).

That is, until corpses suddenly start to appear. While the locals and the legal authorities dismiss the bodies as the results of accidents, Angel thinks otherwise. Particularly when a smarmy local supermarket magnate named Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton) always seems to have some connection to either the "accidents" or their victims.

Unlike the absurdist comedies of Monty Python or the bawdy slapstick of Rowan Atkinson or the late Benny Hill, Pegg and his director and co-scripter Wright bring a different type of English sensibility to their comedies. For one thing, like "Shaun of the Dead," in this film they clearly admire and enjoy the very genre they're trying to send up.

For part of the fun in watching "Hot Fuzz" is noting all of the machismo-tainted cop films from which they draw their inspiration: the "Lethal Weapon" pictures, "Bad Boys I and II" and Kathyrn Bigelow's "Point Break," just to name a few. "Hot Fuzz" is a humorous take on every geek boy's macho fantasy.

Indeed, Frost's Danny Butterman yearns to be Keanu Reeves' cop as much as Pegg's Angel sees himself as "Dirty Harry." Behind the camera, Wright gives "Hot Fuzz" the look of an American-made cop film with his use of kinetic camera shots, near-instantaneous quick-cut editing and a hard-driving rock soundtrack that, at times, even drowns out the voices of the movie's participants.

If there is a problem with "Hot Fuzz," however, it is that in its attempts to be overblown, it becomes overlong. The good cop film is quick, not epic, in length.

In addition, with some scenes of unexpected and gruesome violence, a pall falls over the film's otherwise inspired silliness. "Hot Fuzz" isn't so much a comedy as it is bipolar.

"Hot Fuzz" begs the question of whether or not Pegg and Wright are attempting to create a cop-film parody or a cop-film tribute or just a gross joke about cop movies. It is the mystery that only each viewer can solve.