In the global struggle for movie parody supremacy, America is falling tragically behind. The same year that Hollywood soiled native multiplexes with “Epic Movie,” a shockingly unimaginative and unfunny genre film satire, the British director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and star Simon Pegg have exported their cop movie send-up, “Hot Fuzz,” to American screens.

The recipe and basic ingredients — lampooning the clichés that both define and limit a specific style of filmmaking — are the same in both pictures. The difference is that “Epic Movie” blandly re-creates scenes from other movies before garnishing them with a fart joke or a groin kick to remind you that you’re being served comedy. By contrast, the creators of “Hot Fuzz” ingeniously bake their policier pastiche into an actual story made of actual characters doing and saying things that are actually funny. “Epic Movie” and an increasing number of mainstream American parodies opt for Pavlovian recognition over actual humor. They’re the movie-comedy equivalent of wax display food, while “Hot Fuzz” is a modest, well-prepared, home-cooked meal. You can taste the love in every bite.

In the language of serial-murderer-catcher potboilers: “To mock a buddy cop movie, you must become a buddy cop movie.” In London, humorless, highly efficient star police constable Nicholas Angel (Mr. Pegg) gets a much-deserved promotion to sergeant. But because Sergeant Angel’s arrest record is 400% better than any other bobbie patrolling London, he’s making the rest of the force look bad. Angel’s kick upstairs, his superiors cheerfully inform him, comes with a mandatory transfer to the provincial outpost of Sandford, a bucolic, seemingly crime-free village in the British Midlands.

Angel’s ruthless dedication to duty has also cost him his girlfriend, who is played, in a simultaneously tender and hilarious breakup scene, by an uncredited and barely recognizable Cate Blanchett. Upon arrival in sleepy Sandford, that same dedication and by-the-book intransigence that made Angel single and disliked at home puts him at odds with his new superiors. But rocking the boat in Sandford involves daring to check ID’s at the local pub and failing to appreciate the gravity of a municipal crisis involving an escaped swan.

Sandford’s priggish, self-righteous police and civilian residents are played by a dimly twinkling galaxy of English character actors and minor-league action move icons, from Mike Leigh’s not-so-secret weapon, Jim Broadbent, to former 007 Timothy Dalton (aka “the sneering Bond”). But the real ringer in this oddball dream cast is Angel’s new partner Danny Butterman, played by Nick Frost. An amiable screen presence and a gifted physical comedian, Mr. Frost appears to be the successful result of a secret British experiment to splice Robbie Coltrane and John Belushi.

While Angel has spent his law enforcement career driving himself to near robotic perfection (he even runs like Robert Patrick’s indestructible “Terminator II” supercop), Butterman has spent his career trying to reconcile what he’s learned from watching cops and robbers movies on DVD with the dull realities of provincial police work. “Have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?” PC Butterman asks Sergeant Angel with complete deadpan sincerity. His whole-hearted sentimental identification with soulless Hollywood dreck like “Bad Boys II” is as endearing as it is ridiculous and speaks to the provincial dreamer in everyone. Butterman’s brand loyalty also personifies the curious strength that even the most corrupt Hollywood product can retain a thousand miles away from the back lot and a decade after a recordbreaking opening weekend.

Eventually, and not surprisingly, Sandford’s Stepford-like stasis and a conspiracy that makes it possible force Angel and Butterman to take the law into their own hands. And though the two coppers unravel the on-screen mystery about a reel behind the audience, “Hot Fuzz” stays smart, funny, and sincere to the end.

You’ve got to love (okay, I’ve got to love) a movie that makes more than three references to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” without feeling like it’s high-fiving itself. The unusually delicate on-the-sleeve andup-the-sleeve approach to the films it ostensibly mocks, and the fact that “Hot Fuzz” even boasts a laugh-worthy soundtrack EQ (tea mugs and phones are set down on desks with the same Dolby “boom” as a punch in a Michael Bay movie) rescues the film from “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” smugness and catapults it into Frank Tashlin antic genius territory.

Like Messrs. Wright and Pegg’s feature film debut, the zombie movie spoof “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” seems to simultaneously exist as a satirical weapon and a satirical target. The modest miracle of the film is that it isn’t just a fanboy punch list of genre film tropes and it doesn’t inflate into the dulling three-plus-hour self-indulgence of send-ups like “Grindhouse.” Both a genial burlesque of Bruckheimer-era excess and its own lean, homegrown genre mongrel, “Hot Fuzz” is know-the-rules-before-you-break-them filmmaking at its most satisfying.