Team America: World Police



When it was first announced that the creators of South Park were going to make a parody of action movies using marionettes I was skeptical. Why would Matt Stone and Trey Parker make a movie using the only things less expressive than construction paper cutouts? Joke’s on me I guess, here’s Team America: World Police, a movie that plays like the result of someone having watched too much Thunderbirds as a kid.


"This ought to keep the French from making any more bad comedies that will become bad Hollywood comedies!"

The plot is a straight forward parody of summer action movies. Team America is a multi-ethnic cadre of terrorist fighters who operate out of a base behind Mt. Rushmore. After saving Paris from terrorists with WMD (there they are, Mr. President!), one member of the team is killed. The team leader Spottswoode (clearly modeled after the eldest Tracy and perhaps named after the director of The 6th Day – or maybe it’s just a juvenile pun) finds a replacement in Gary, the best actor in the world. Team America needs Gary to use his acting skill to go undercover as a terrorist and find out the specifics of the terrorists’ master plan, which will be “9/11 times a thousand.” (“That’s right – 911,000.”)

Team America: World Police grinds through the big budget action movie formula very faithfully. Gary has a crisis of faith where he has to get over the fact that his acting killed his brother years ago, another Team America member hates actors, there are a couple of love triangles that are only solved through horrible adversity. In the end Gary has to be trained to be a super agent to save the rest of the team, who have all been imprisoned in the James Bondian fortress of Kim Jong Ill.


"How evil am I? I stole these glasses from the grave of that woman in the Old Navy commercials."

What surprised me about Team America is that it isn’t very funny. I’ve gotten more laughs out of most 30 minute episodes of South Park than I did this 90 minute movie. I guess Stone and Parker were just counting on the fact that all this action was being done with puppets would make it funny. The thing is, I’ve seen far more outrageous puppet antics, whether it’s the weird romantic fantasy that was the Cliff Richard Jr. dream sequence in Thunderbirds Are GO! (1966) or the hyper-gory puppet fu of Legend of the Sacred Stone (2000).  Stone and Parker add puppet vomit and gymnastic puppet sex to the mix, but I don’t think that’s enough to support an entire movie. Many other jokes that were rather basic got a big laugh out of the preview audience I was with. Is a Broadway marquee that says “Lease: The Musical” really laugh out loud funny?

Underling the lack of inspiration was that two of the more elaborate jokes were recycled from South Park. One of the funniest parts of the movie is the training montage, accompanied by a song about training montages in movies. My friend Chris pointed out that the song was recycled whole from an episode of South Park. And just like the Disney-esque song Satan warbled in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999) Kim Jong Ill sings the sappy song “I’m So Ronrey.” I didn’t think that gag was very funny the first time, and wasting another 3 minutes of screen time to rehash it seemed self-indulgent to me.


"At least it's better than working for Martha Stewart."

If you have any illusions about Team America being a vicious satire of current events, let me disabuse you of them. Team America has a bad habit of blowing up monuments when they go after terrorists, and there are a couple of horribly cliché patriotic montages, and liberal Hollywood icons get killed in various gory ways, but there’s nothing very deep here. Matt Drudge ran a report (so it must be true!) that said that “White House insiders” were very concerned about the movie, but the intent here wasn’t to be topical. Oh well. Maybe there are certain people in the White House who are worried about being portrayed as a puppet.

Posted: Mon - October 11, 2004 at      

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