Rated R

With only two feature films, the British production team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg already have established an uncanny fanboy fluency. They exhibit unfathomable depths of understanding for the shallowest of pop-culture staples. They mine all the clichés of a given genre and reweave the lot into novel, character-driven comedies. With their first attempt, the sublime “Shaun of the Dead,” they took a page out of nearly every zombie script ever produced and re-bound them with a particularly English working class, bangers-and-mash sensibility. As harrowing as any of the gorefests they assayed, yet populated with a procession of characters so believable and endearing that by the end, after all the cudgelings, shotgun blasts and eviscerations, the story managed to be actually quite touching. And riotously funny.

Now they take aim at the good ol’ overblown American buddy-cop action picture. Blatantly, even literally, flaunting their “Lethal Weapon”/“Bad Boys” source material, they’ve recast Pegg, the dumpy slacker hero of “Shaun of the Dead,” as a big-city crimestopper so much better at his job than any other cop in London that he’s promoted right out of town—reassigned by his jealous “superiors” to the cutest, quietest, crime-free-est village in all of England. And then the trouble begins.

In addition to antagonistic natives, distrustful co-workers and dubious accidents, there’s a hidden weapons cache and an actual wild goose chase. There’s also a heartpounding foot pursuit through the village’s backyard gardens (in which Pegg, in typical Hollywood fashion, even establishes a tagline for himself, quoting his own line from “Shaun of the Dead”: “What? You never take a short cut?” just may prove to be his “I’ll be back”).

However, even through the barrage of inspired one-liners, running gags and rousing action sequences, there’s one noticeable gap in the writing. Having clearly trained their sights on extravagant big-budget Hollywood boomfests, the second act—perhaps because they didn’t actually have a big budget—gives over to an Agatha Christy-ish whodunit. The film features about two dozen supporting characters, all of whom (except one) seem simultaneously completely benign and immediately suspicious. Something’s clearly run afoul under the town’s perfect façade, and just about everyone could be a suspect. The casting itself is suspiciously cerebral—a Who’s Who of award-winning British talent, including Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine and, most slyly of all, Edward Woodward (points if you know why this is sly). The Gold Star goes to the ever-underrated Timothy Dalton—perfectly cast and openly having a ball with his role as the slippery embodiment of smiling sinistry.

In some exceptionally bloody flourishes, the narrative also takes a sideways slide into slasher flick territory, for which the boys show a remarkable, if misplaced, aptitude. Although these elements certainly help to add some weight and excitement to the proceedings, they seem invasive, and not a little out of step.

Another painful irony: their parody by its very nature falls prey to many of the tired conventions inherent to the buddy-cop formula. With constant gratuitous gunfire and no less than three “final” showdowns (among them an amusingly inventive, if decidedly low-expense, inversion of Hollywood’s “huge exploding set piece” standard), it begins to hover precipitously near the reasons these movies have become tedious in their own right.

With those minor caveats in place, “Hot Fuzz” is great entertainment. If you like comedy, mystery, or even a mindless big bang free-for-all, Wright and Pegg deliver the goods. What film staple might they skewer next? Space opera? Underdog-sports-team-makes-good? I can’t wait till they get around to spoofing Slovenian melodrama. I’d wager they could do it, and make it fun.