A crop of veteran Brit actors play the village elders: Billie Whitelaw, Paul Freeman, Edward Woodward, Anne Reid, and most notably Jim Broadbent as the amiable Police Chief Frank Butterman and Timothy Dalton, splendid as the supermarket manager with a wicked smirk and untrustworthy moustache. Did you identify Cate Blanchett's voice as the woman who dumps Pegg? And did you recognize who that was masquerading as Santa Claus?

Hot Fuzz is better than Shaun Of The Dead, but the pumped-up project does suffer from its share of problems. It's 20 minutes too long for an adventure comedy, and finally falls apart as it struggles towards a number of combustible climaxes. Still, it’s an exuberant, ultraviolent and quintessentially English with the obligatory full-tilt bombastic car chases and shotgun-wielding grannies and disarmingly credible chase and shoot-out set-pieces. And, yeah, Shaun of the Dead was too long too.