Team America: World Police

Team America, Fuck Yeah!

reviewed Sun, 20 Feb 2005

"Making Team America was just not that fun," Trey Parker has said. "It was, most of the time, horrific."

Well, thank you, Trey and Matt, for your suffering (and for the many entertaining interviews you've given to promote this movie). The boys cleverly used the real-life events around the movie to ridicule hypocrisy and idiocy as much as the film itself does, most famously by complaining about the MPAA's moronic aversion to the extended marionette sex scene. Matt Stone carped that the cuts the MPAA board ordered in the sex scene (it took

9 tries to get the board's approval) completely changed the tenor of the characters' relationship: "The puppets [originally made] love for about three and half minutes, now it's just a cheap one-night stand."

Parker and Stone originally wanted to do an all-marionette remake of The Day After Tomorrow, but lawyers nixed that idea. While I wouldn't mind seeing that oeuvre, I'm happy with Team America: World Police, the all-marionette skewering of the U.S.'s chest-beating jingoism. The marionettes themselves are astonishingly lifelike; they've got more range of expression than, say, Rene Russo or Tom Cruise. The laughs are frequent -- and as hit-or-miss -- as in South Park, with the added bonus of slamming the obnoxious foreign "policy" of the current regime, and I loved the fierce "panthers" (you'll have to see the movie to understand).

The movie mocks brain-dead blockbusters as much as, if not more than, politics (Trey Parker describes the typical Jerry Bruckheimer hero's character arc thusly: "'I'm fucking awesome! I'm fucking sweet! I ... am ... awesome.' Then in the middle of the movie comes the point where 'maybe I'm not so awesome,' and then in the end he's like, 'Nooo, I am. I am awesome.'"); the best song in the film begins, "I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor," and choruses with, "All I'm trying to say is Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you."

The ridiculing of anti-war celebrities gets pretty tedious, partly because this easy yet utterly pointless target takes on more significance than the terrorists (led by Kim Jong-Il) who they are inadvertently helping, partly because it's so juvenile (calling their coalition the Film Actors Guild, a.k.a. F.A.G.). I took particular umbrage at the gratuitous depiction of Matt Damon, one of the more intelligent, thoughtful actors out there, as a drooling idiot (my umbrage lessened when I read that this characterization had nothing to do with Damon himself; Stone said that when Damon's puppet came out of the oven, "he just looked retarded. ... Honestly, I think Matt Damon is one of the better actors around. ... And for no real reason, he is retarded in this movie").

I think this mean-spirited, childish mocking backfires; I noticed in the audience I saw it with the dynamic that concerned Hank Stuever of the Washington Post:

"Stunned by all the fun, I am almost moved to salute Parker and Stone for their nuanced and careful takedown of American jingoism and the seemingly disastrous foreign policy that Team America stands for.

Only that isn't quite how it played to an audience on Tuesday night, at one of those free-ticket radio station giveaway previews in a packed cineplex in Northwest Washington. The biggest laughs came when 'Team America' assaulted any and all concepts of ethnicity, or when the joke was on gays, Michael Moore or a vast left-wing idiocy.

The movie feels like an elaborate inside joke on the very Americans laughing hardest at its easiest gags, oblivious to the sly, allegorical digs at a USA brand of bravado. What I took as a lampoon of Bushworld seemed to be received, in the seats around me, as a triumph of Bushworld."

I trust none of you will miss the joke as badly as many people seem to, but it's still disturbing that Parker and Stone made the liberal-bashing so outlandish and so prominent that it overshadows the self-obsessed, self-righteous, overbearing sanctimony of Team America. Amazingly, the South Park guys are too subtle (likewise, I remember reading a review of South Park's latest season where the reviewer complained the show had become the sort of trite morality lesson it used to mock -- clearly someone who missed the point as badly as Michael Bay did in Pearl Harbor).