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Movie: Team America World Police
Starring a bunch of puppets
Directed by Trey Parker
Written by Tray Parker and Matt Stone (Paramount)
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes
Team America is a deadly lampoon of hyperpatriotic action movies. Or maybe it's really promoting a new kind of patriotic mayhem. Whatever, it's certain that it's all done with puppets in the style of ancient TV shows like Fireball XL5, and it's riotously funny.
Team America is a group of commandos out to rid the world from terrorists everywhere and they are very good at what they do, except they always seem to destroy the local landmarks along the way. A key member is killed in the opening scene, so Spottswood, the team's leader, hires an actor, Gary Johnston, to become their new undercover man. And like any good action hero, he promptly goes under the covers with his fellow Team American, Sarah.
Director Trey Parker already is infamous enough for creating South Park but here he mines deeper into his motherlode of comedy than ever before. The puppet pornography scene alone is enough to earn this movie a place in history but the AIDS song that Gary sings will make you squirm and the hard rock soundtrack (America! Fuck yeah!) in the air attack sequence will dredge up a kind of patriotism that um, no one's ever heard of before. Topping it all however is the showdown scene in Kim Jong Il's citadel, where Gary tells the misguided do-gooder actors all about the three kinds of people in the world. It will leave your head spinning with its sheer audacity.
Parker keeps bringing up trainloads of pure satire like this, and unloading it on so many different subjects that it's hard to tell how he really feels about things sometimes. After all he was interviewed by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, but in Team America he portrays Moore as one of Alec Baldwin's league of Leftie fanatics who goes so far as to blow himself up. Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and others receive similar treatment. Maybe Parker's real point is that we are all like puppets, attached to strings and controlled by an unseen master. Or maybe he just got tired of doing South Park's low budget style of animation.
It's strange that this movie should arrive in the wake of 911 and the divisive War on Terror in Iraq, but nothing's sacred in 21st Century America, is it? Call it the Black Hawk Down of comedy, because I don't really like what this movie says at a lot of points, yet I have to admit I laughed my ass off.
The Skinny:
Am I glad I saw the movie? Definitely puts the F back in Freedom.
Would I go to see it again? Might become a guilty pleasure, very guilty.
© 2004 - Rusty Pipes