Team America: World Police
Paramount Home Video VHS & DVD
1 hr 38 mins
Directors: Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Team America: World Police” is like spying on your adolescents while they play with action figures: alternately crude, amusing and weird all at the same time, only with a $20 million-plus budget. Not to say that this is a bad thing because it’s actually kind of liberating to see two of America’s most over-hyped and misunderstood “satirists” poke fun at action films. This turns out to have more value than any of the fascist fantasy movies of Bruckheimer and Schwarzenegger (“The Rock” and “Armageddon” and “Commando”) with a lot of jingoistic “Top Gun” sentiments thrown in. “Team America” cheerfully exploits these films by infusing their style but playing it out with marionettes, wires akimbo and visible, succeeding at being very funny but also failing as a satire, because Stone and Parker mistake mockery for parody.
“Team America” starts with a bang: A tradeoff of nuclear arms among terrorists along the Champs ElysÈes is noticed by a wide-eyed (puppet) girl, who is then threatened until America’s special defense unit, Team America, shows up to save the day, while annihilating most of Paris in the process. What almost passes as brilliance in these beginning scenes is its deadpan delivery of action as played out by, well, puppets (or, to be more precise for purists out there, marionettes), that have this eerie doe-eyed expression and heads that are anatomically too big for their bodies. Their jilted and flaccid movements against the beautifully constructed miniatures (courtesy of Production Designer Jim Dultz) paint a strangely surreal picture that is the entire joke of the film. I cannot say the joke ever wears itself out but it definitely does require more imagination.
The film descends into a type of camp that only Stone and Parker can deliver. They recruit reluctant actor Gary Johnston to infiltrate the terrorists (he is starring in a “Rent”-like musical whose closing number would shame “The Producers”‘ “Springtime for Hitler”) and the team goes to work. The best bits of the film involve throwaway gags such as the team’s “secret” hideout in the faces of Mount Rushmore; Gary’s hitting bottom and vomiting for an uncomfortably long time; the notorious marionette sex scene that earned the film an NC17 rating before it was trimmed down from two minutes (!) to 30 seconds, and Kim Jong II’s marionette delicately singing “I’m Lonely” while he tours his torture palace.
Where “Team America” does fail is in its supposed satire that smacks heavily of peppy nihilism. There is no figure and no situation that Stone and Parker leave unscathed yet this left me curiously empty. For example, later in the film, actors that publicly flaunt their political causes (Sean Penn, Matt Damon and George Clooney to name a few) are viciously attacked with no real service to the plot and, since we are watching a mockery of a genre, the whole experience becomes a cheap shot that does get very old. I don’t mind it in small doses, such as on “South Park,” but for 90 minutes it becomes a type of bullying that stops the film from being amusing and escorts it into the realm of grating.
– Joe Ramirez
