The new sheriff wants to leave the town of Normal, Minnesota just the way he found it.
As a fill-in, due to the previous sheriff freezing to death while ice fishing, Ulysses (our hero, naturally), has only a short stay in town, shacking up at the town’s only motel, just enough time before the county can elect a new sheriff. The local deputy, Mike Nelson (no relation to MST3K) shows Ulysses around town while fussily planning the winter parade route. Nothing much happens here, and the people, even the cops and a local moose on the loose, are friendly, the meatloaf is recommended, and if you do not look too closely, everything is, well, normal.
But the sheriff, a laid-back and chill Bob Odenkirk, may be well past his salad years, yet he cannot help but notice that some of the details are just a bit off. A 1.6 Million dollar theatre restoration, an alarmingly overstocked police armoury, and a mayor (Henry Winkler) giving him a bit too much side-eye.
The introduction of all the shops (including the cop-shop) and restaurants along the main street forms a low-key first act set-up, that is charming and workmanlike in both its subtlety and restrained commentary on an overly-armed, and hair-trigger rural America. Seemingly, the only overt danger to anyone is an imminent one-in-a-decade snow storm, and the equally strange cold-open in Osaka, Japan, where two disgraced Yakuza are exiled to America for some reason that just might come around to be important.
When a spectacularly random, and botched bank robbery that screams “weaponized incompetence,” breaks the town's nothing-ever-happens-here streak, before you can say “For the greater good,” the team behind John Wick (and Nobody) and Ben Wheatley, the director who made Kill List and Free Fire, have unleashed a holy hellfire of violence and mayhem on main street.
Sight gags, and I mean that quite literally in the form of winching eye trauma at both the knitting shop and the hardware store, are the tip of the iceberg on the creative action set-ups that abound for the remainder of the film, which I will not spoil. Suffice it to say, just as the town descends into violent chaos, the winter squall hits and cuts the power, and the rest of the Yakuza hop on an transatlantic flight.
While Wheatley may not quite have the flair for entering and exiting frame and scene-transition comedy that Edgar Wright uses, his kind of Minnesota-nice Hot Fuzz excels in action set-ups and nasty pay offs. Every townsperson (including a small but critical part by Lena Headey that brings a bit of weight to the Ulyssey's back-story) and nearly every building in town offers a location for violence that is well staged, precise, and often, unexpectedly funny.
Odenkirk brings a mustachioed world-weary, "I've seen some shit," competence to the whole affair that balances the protracted action scenes, and helps keep the runaway freight-train on the rails, even as each new and unexpected layer of chaos threatens to carry the film away from the point which substitute-Sheriff Ulysses cannot leave the town just has he found it.