In lesser hands Team America: World Police could have been a puppet version of Hot Shots! Part Deux but the South Park team
have gone the extra mile, throwing in hardcore puppet sex, copious
swearing and blasphemy, projectile vomiting, puppet disembowelment and
ethnic insensitivity. What’s not to like?
Gary, an actor
starring on Broadway in "Lease: The Musical" (key song – “Everybody’s
Got AIDS”), is the ultimate weapon. He’s got a deliciously square jaw
and a double major in theatre and international languages. It’s only a
matter of time before he comes to the attention of the mysterious (and
barely closeted) Agent Spottswoode. Gary is to join the USA’s crack
freedom-fightin’ anti-terrorist squad, Team America.
There,
he’ll use his incomparable Broadway technique to infiltrate an Arab
terror cell and Save the World. But that’s not all. He’ll also confront
the memory of his dead brother, torn apart by gorillas during a family
trip to the zoo. He’ll engage in hardcore puppet sex with a fellow team
member. He’ll hit the bottle after a failed mission end and up lying
face down in gallons – yes, gallons - of his own vomit. And he’ll come
back from the brink to Save the World once more – this time from North
Korea’s Kim Jong Il and a cabal of appeasement-minded Hollywood
A-listers.
Sophisticated satire? Hardly. Parker and Stone’s
geopolitical theory is based around the idea that the world is divided
into three camps: “dicks, pussies, and assholes”- but Team America still works on just about every other level: as a gross-out comedy, as a dumb-ass satire, as a musical. As in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the funniest moments often come in song. Team America's
theme, “America, F**K Yeah!” blares whenever they blast off from their
Mount Rushmore HQ and their heart-wrenching power ballad scores a
direct hit on Jerry Bruckheimer: “I miss you more than Michael Bay
missed the mark/When he made Pearl Harbor/ I miss you more than that movie missed the point/And that’s an awful lot, girl.”
It's
also a great visual achievement. Roaming around impressively detailed,
one-third scale sets, the camera work is terrific, the action sequences
hammy but very much on-the-money. The puppetry (by the Chiodo brothers)
revels in its own Thunderbirds-style inadequacy when it comes to walking, fighting or, in this case, fucking.
But the real strength of Team America: World Police
lies in its even-handedness. Parker and Stone mock liberal Hollywood
and hawkish government, they mock action, they mock romance, mock the
conventions of movie sex, the snobby French (naturellement), Broadway
musicals, film censorship boards (just how do you classify hardcore
puppet love?) and anything remotely “foreign” to the middle-American
way of thinking.
Move over Michael Moore. The definitive cinematic response to the War on Terror isn’t Fahrenheit 9/11 anymore, it’s Team America: World Police.
EXTRAS Extras on the newly-released 'Uncut' Special Collectors Edition include
an abundance of featurettes, deleted scenes, storyboards but still, no
commentary. Conclusion:
Movie: 80% Extras: 75%
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