You have the right to remain violent: "Hot Fuzz"

Before this very belated post, I need a little help: Which movie looks more hilarious, "Superbad" or "Balls of Fury?" Saw trailers for both over the weekend, and each had me rolling. Hunt then down online and see for yourself.

Now, about "Hot Fuzz." Here's when I decided this movie wasn't merely funny but brilliant.

There's a scene late in the game, when all hell is breaking loose and our hero has just taken down a bad guy in one of those "break a million things" scuffles. The camera zooms in for the one-liner, but it never comes. Kind of surprising, since the story so far had been a solid riff on action movies.

Cut to the next scene, when - amid bullets flying - the hero tells his partner about the fight. The partner asks if he said the exact line I had thought of. The hero says no, but that he had a good line during an earlier fight with the same bad guy.

I mean, when you're pausing in a firefight to talk about good one-liner you should or did say during mayhem, that's gold. Gold, Jerry! And that was just one example of this dead-on parody of/homage to over-the-top action movies, particularly the partner/buddy angle that borders on homoerotica.

"Hot Fuzz" comes from the guys who did Shaun of the Dead, which the simple-minded might say "skewered" zombie movies. That's sells it short, considering how sharp the movie was. Really, sometimes I feel smarter for watching a film that sends up a genre with something more sophisticated than fart jokes. (Not that "Shaun" didn't have fart jokes.)

If "Shaun" was pretty good, "Fuzz" is fantastic. It starts with a classic set-up: The straight-laced stud cop (Simon Pegg, aka Shaun) -- so good he makes everyone else look bad -- is cast out from London to a small village, where he ends up partners with a screw-up (and the police chief's son), played by his pal from "Shaun" (Nick Frost). This leads to some magical chemistry that I haven't seen since Maverick and Goose mastered the over-under high five all those years ago.

Pegg is a little guy but pulls off the hardcase role well, while the flabby Frost is an earnest lapdog, aching for some real action like in the movies. We also get a lot of famous -- well, famous in England -- faces in supporting roles: Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine, Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman, Stephen Merchant, Cate Blanchett. Yes, that's right ... Cate Blanchett.

What starts as a wry homage to those movies graduates midway through to a full-on parody, but the players still are aware of what's being spoofed. It's hard to explain, but the scene I mentioned earlier really sums it up. The easy joke is to ham it up the whole time, and yes, there are all sorts of gratuitous explosions and rampant silliness. But there's also a cleverness that you just don't see in a Will Ferrell vehicle. Make sense? Probably not.

In any case, I can't recommend this highly enough. I'll see it again at some point, and I also can't wait to see what the next target is after these guys have taken on zombies and action heroes. Maybe they can try a two-fer, combining a period piece -- think "Sense and Sensibility" -- with science fiction. After all, some of those corsets already make parts of a woman's anatomy defy gravity.