TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE is a scatter shot film that forces one to ponder who, exactly, the target audience is. Ten-year-olds whose potty training went badly? Others whose emotional and intellectual development was arrested for that or any of a multitude of other reasons? Ultimately the only certainty is that this flick is yet another harbinger that the total collapse of civilization as we know it has drawn just a little closer. That same one can be forgiven if one had expected more from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, those deliciously subversive elves who nail popular culture in all its absurdist splendor on their television show, South Park, and who had us all humming Blame Canada as we left the theater after seeing the film version, suggestively, but correctly subtitled: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT. Alas. TEAM AMERICA offers little more than a ditty comparing the pain of lost love to the pain of sitting through PEARL HARBOR, with a particular jab at Ben Afflecks need for an acting coach. Its good, but by no means good enough.
The premise has the eponymous team of exceptionally good-looking hot shots with perfect hair and snazzy outfits policing the globe in equally snazzy, and heavily armed vehicles to make it safe from terrorists. Of course, theyre not the best shots, and any sense of proportion is lost on them, so mostly they end up taking out the terrorists, but also most of the countryside, not to mention the EiffelTower, the Pyramids, and Big Ben. With the world ticked off, the world is ready to listen to a cabal of liberal actors, the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G, led by Alec Baldwin, who want to put Team America out of business. Their hatred for the Team leads them to become the collective the pawn of Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, who wants to destroy the world because hes feeling lonely. Team American strikes back by recruiting a Broadway actor to, well, honestly, it just doesnt matter. Suffice to say that here was a premise ripe with promise that was cruelly snuffed out along with the audiences will to live.
The conceit was to marry the cheesiest action movie clichés ever assembled in one film and to have them acted out by marionettes, which would, of course, give a legitimate excuse for the wooden acting required. What we have learned from this is that a send up of a cheesy movie without a spark of underlying originality is just a cheesy movie. Points for attempting to have the marionettes slug it out with martial arts moves, or even engaging in several poses from Kama Sutra, complete with canned music, candlelight, and nudity, albeit full nudity that lacks primary sexual characteristics, though it is a little disturbing. Deduct them all and then some for coming up with nothing better than that cheesy dialogue spiced up with the words that the FCC wont allow over the public airwaves, and by having one of the puppets engage in projectile vomiting for five minutes of screen time. If only there werent those glimmers of genuinely pointed anarchy to taunt us, like Kim Jong Il releasing panthers that are all to obviously real live kitty cats to devour the intrepid team. But no, its more poo jokes and F.A.G. references.
TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE is a one-joke flick that wears thin after five minutes. For some reason, Stone and Parker were so enamored of that one joke that they didn’t think needed more than just those puppets bouncing along uncertainly to keep it afloat. On the other hand, at least it makes me appreciate the tightly focused satire of SouthPark all the more.
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