They had me at “From the guys who brought you Shaun of the Dead.”

Nicholas Angel is the Supercop on London’s Metropolitan Police Force. He has a four hundred percent higher arrest record than anyone else and he can do everything a cop needs to better than anyone else. Needless to say, everyone on the force hates him — he’s making them look bad. So Angel gets shipped out to the picturesque village of Sandford, the sort of place that wins Village of the Year awards and where nothing ever happens. Or…does it?

Angel immediately starts applying his Supercop ways to a town where the biggest problem appears to be a seriously bad production of Romeo and Juliet. Angel’s new partner is Danny Butterman, a shlubby guy who’s the son of the town’s amiable police captain. He’s also got a serious jones for American cop movies, like Bad Boys II and Point Blank, and he’s wondering what it’s like to be a Supercop, guns blazing, taking down criminals. Needless to say, he’s gonna find out.

The movie manages to be a fun parody of American cop movies and quaint British villages all at the same time. The third act, which involves more guns and ammo than have probably ever existed in Great Britain (including pre-peace settlement Northern Ireland), is utterly hilarious. I loved Shaun of the Dead and this is a great followup — however Edgar Wright (writer and director), Simon Pegg (writer and star), and Nick Frost (star) put these insane things together, it works great.

                    DARIN
               (via IRC to Maciej)
     We just saw 300.

                    MACIEJ
               (via IRC)
     That movie reminded me a lot of work.

                    DARIN
               (via IRC)
     Hopefully not the shell-of-shields scene.

Darin repeats Maciej's comment to Diane.

                    DIANE
     Wow. I'm going to have to stop by your
     office a LOT more.

                    MACIEJ
               (via IRC)
     Tell her it's not so much six-packs as
     it is pony kegs.

300 is ostensibly the story of when the 300 Spartans stood against approximately 1 billion Persians and almost had them at a stalemate. has a lot of half-naked actors with amazingly great bodies who run around with swords hacking one another to bits. In addition, there’s also some amazing photography that had me wondering, How exactly did they film that? (Even given that a lot of the movie is blue screen and not especially high-tech special effects, I was left wondering that a lot. The director of photography and the production designer should be getting a lot of work off this flick.)

Also: half-naked men with great bodies. (Oh. Did I mention that already?) Gerard Butler has two personal trainers in the credits. I figured it worked like this: Personal trainer #1 works Butler over, and then when he’s done, Personal trainer #2 shows up and works Butler into the ground.

It’s not as horribly, untenably violent as I was expecting, probably because it retains its comic-booky feel and the violence doesn’t feel wrenching the way it would in a more realistic movie. If you’re planning on seeing it, you should definitely see it on the big screen.

ETA: How tough were the Spartans? They had smallpox shots. (One naked guy kept getting closeups on his arm and I kept thinking, Did no editor see that and say, Hey, we need an airbrush here stat?)

Wait a second: Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore play a composer and lyricist who write a pop song together, and we’re supposed to believe Drew Barrymore is the witty one good with words?