Hot Fuzz straddles the line between parody and pastiche for a good amount of its 121 minute runtime, but its a loving tribute to the genre of American cop films which Danny adores (most evidently Bad Boys II and Point Break), as well as weird British mystery horror films like The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now. It's a strange blending of genre from that perspective, and a great deal of the film's jokes come from that referential parentage, but Wright's love for cinema and the material elevates the film through that context, and enough attention is given to each of those strands to make it a thoroughly dazzling affair.

At this point in his career, Wright has quite a range of films under his proverbial directors belt, and it's always interesting for me to talk with other film fans and find out where each of them rank from a personal perspective. I'm always surprised when Hot Fuzz shows up on the bottom, and even more surprised when they say because they didn't find it funny. The film can be too clever for its own good at times, but even from a non-cinephilic perspective, the film is ripe with comic material, whether its defusing a sea mine belonging to a mumbling farmer (David Bradley) or the colorful cast of supporting actors who adorn the Sanford police station (most notably Olivia Colman, Paddy Considine, and Rafe Spall), or the fence jumping bit which I've loved since seeing it in the first brief teaser trailer for the film, that acts as a callback to Shaun of the Dead and was even spoofed again in Wright's 2013 film The World's End.