'Hot Fuzz' (R)(out of four)

It's been a long while since we've seen the likes of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright -- comedians capable of balancing creative wits with a seamless, ingenious filmmaking style that takes their jokes to a whole new level.

Together, this British pair doesn't just create characters worth chuckling over tears down the very establishment of the filmmaking profession -- much as Mel Brooks did over his reign as cinema's funnyman. The result is comedy with an edge, bite and a wealth of surprises.

As Will Ferrell mindlessly grunts and Eddie Murphy plays with an endless array of prosthetics, Pegg and Wright are doing something more unusual, and rewarding, with their big-budget comedies: They're making comedy smart again.

Not that a substantial number of film fans aren't already aware of this dynamic duo. At first popular television personalities on British television, they made a moderate splash in the U.S. in 2004 with "Shaun of the Dead," which took a pinch of a romantic comedy, a dash of a zombie film and scrambled it up with a film style that gave the concoction a flavor that's never been tasted before.

While that film's hero wandered the streets, distraught and dejected over the girl who dumped him, faint explosions could be heard going off in the background and zombies could be seen wandering by the windows. "Shaun of the Dead's" sad schmuck wasn't just an anti-hero; he was a hero unaware of the movie he had just accidentally stumbled into.

And there was also a scathing bit of satire to be found in the theme: Are we already a globe populated by walking zombies? For their part, Pegg and Wright -- who both wrote the film, while Wright directed -- use many of the same techniques in "Hot Fuzz," which takes on the American action genre much as "Shaun of the Dead" tackled the dry zombie formula.

Sgt. Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is a good cop -- the best in the force, in fact. So good that his superiors (Bill Nighy, in a humorous cameo) rush to transfer him out of the city, since he's showing up all other lazy loafers on the squad.

Soon Angel finds himself in the suburban utopia of Sanford, walking the beat in a city where the biggest scandal is the small patch of graffiti near the town fountain, and the drunken driving habits of Danny Butterman (Wright), who just so happens to be his new colleague at the police department.

Day after day, Angel bides his time, waiting for something -- anything -- to happen that might make his day more exciting. He's a 2007 cop trapped in a 1950s world, a Jack Bauer trapped in a Mayberry.

And it's the setting for a most humorous premise, as Angel draws his gun at a family of geese waddling across the road and insists they clear the way for the few oncoming cars being inconvenienced, as the movie makes everything from paperwork to the parking of a car an intense, death-defying experience.

Here, everything is amped up, accelerated and infused with adrenaline -- the click of a pen, the turn of a key in the ignition, seemingly even the tie of a shoelace. And the faster the film spins out of control, taking the Hollywood handbook of such thrillers as "Con-Air" or "The Fast and the Furious" and stretching it to the extreme, the more deliriously insane the whole thing becomes.

It's funny because it's relentless, because it so shrewdly takes a silly story, dresses it up with the more serious film language we've come to know so well from Saturday nights out at the movies, and pokes fun at how ridiculous the whole conversation is. If most action movies are insults, here's the hilarious comeback we've been waiting for.