Hot Fuzz then. Sigh. Where to start?

About a month ago someone in my household suggested that I watch the film Hot Fuzz. She'd watched it a couple of weeks previously and said although it wasn't great, it was an enjoyable enough way to spend a couple of hours. I didn't really want to see it, partly because I suspected that the only great joke had been in the adverts on TV (the fence one), and partly because of what I'd read and heard about it. Mark Kermode on Five Live reviewed it when Simon Pegg was in the studio and you could hear him straining to find positive things to say about it. He said it had passed his six laugh rule for what constitutes a decent comedy - six laughs out loud. And I think what put me off was that several correspondents then wrote in and asked how he'd found six. That said - and this is important - I went in with an open mind. And even if I hadn't, I'm convinced it wouldn't have mattered. I've got plenty of examples of going into something expecting, indeed wanting, it to be one thing and finding it to be another. One of each - I wanted The Office to be useless because I so hated Ricky Gervais on The 11 O'Clock Show and his chat show, but it was brilliant and my antipathy counted for nought; and I was drooling when I went to the cinema for The Simpsons Movie, only for it to turn out to be a massive disappointment which made me laugh about three times.

Anyway, Hot Fuzz. I didn't laugh once. It's obvious from the above that I wasn't really expecting to, and maybe if I'd been drunk or just watched something hilarious I might have been predisposed to (actually I'd just watched David Mitchell on good form on Would I Lie To You, so scrub that), but I just didn't find any of it funny - apart from the fence which I'd seen a dozen times before. Even if you put to one side the old hat "country people are all weird inbreds who fear outsiders" element, which has surely been taken as far as it can by The League Of Gentlemen, the jokes just weren't good enough. And as it went on being not funny, I started to get annoyed at it. About 40 minutes in I had a "give me strength" moment at this exchange:

Nick Frost: "What made you want to become a policeman?"

Simon Pegg: "Officer"

Nick Frost: "What made you want to become a policeman officer?"

So at that point I thought OK, it's not going to be funny, I'll just run with the murder mystery side of it. But then that got a ludicrous resolution - which, again, wouldn't matter if it were funny, which I presume it was meant to be - which was itself then jettisoned to make way for the interminable Hollywood shoot out ending. By which point I was so bored I just started to wind through it.

The next day, to reassure myself that it's not just me and that the film has been whipped up by a partisan British press, I went to imdb.com to look at some of the comments. Inexplicably, it's rated 8.0 out of 10. The main featured review says "Hot Fuzz is crammed full of excellent characters, ranging from the eccentric to the diabolical, and every one gets at least one laugh during the course of the movie and most of them get many more. I don't mean to suggest that this film is wall to wall gags; in fact it is far from it, instead it is just very clever and often very subtle humour that runs continuously throughout the film." Very subtle humour? Very subtle humour?! "For me this film was every bit as good as Shaun of the Dead, and it's definitely one of the best comedies ever made." This last sentence may very well be the least accurate statement ever made about cinema.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe people pissing on the floor in pubs is comedy gold. Anyway, enough of this subject - it's getting as boring as the last half hour of Hot Fuzz.