Politics Unusual
Team America: World Police, starring the voices of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and others
To an unprecedented degree, 2004 has been the year of the political movie. From Fahrenheit 9/11 to The Fog of War to several documentaries about both Kerry and Bush, filmmakers have decided to put their stakes in the ground this year and use their movies to express their political views.
The latest entrant in this year’s movie-as-political-soapbox derby comes from the twisted geniuses behind South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Knowing the pair’s reputation for irreverence and the film's title, you might think that Team America would be a parody America’s recent interventionist tendencies and feature a liberal (pun intended) sprinkling of potshots against President Bush and members of his Administration. But you would, in fact, be wrong.
While the movie does make fun of America’s clumsy efforts to maintain world peace—and I do mean clumsy, since the characters are all played by puppets with barely-articulated limbs—the real targets of this movie are actually Hollywood liberals who promote political issues like Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn. Far from criticizing America’s recent foreign policy, Team America actually winds up supporting it, as our heroes stop a mad Kim Il Jung bent on destroying the world by persuading the world's leaders that what America offers is considerably better than the anarchic alternative (not surprisingly, the argument for an interventionist America is made in much—and I do mean much--coarser language).
Team America unfolds with an elite fighting team being assembled to stop the world’s worst terrorists. To help their cause, they recruit Broadway actor Gary Johnston (voiced by Trey Parker), who’s reluctant to use his acting “powers” because he always ends up hurting people. After one mission ends badly, Gary quits the team, leaving them to face Kim Il Jung (voiced by Trey Parker) and his team of liberal Hollywood actor/flunkies (most of whom are voiced by—you guessed it—Trey Parker) all by themselves. Gary ultimately rejoins the team at their darkest moment, of course, but not before he hits bottom and lies sprawled face-down in a Bel Air mansion-sized pool of his own vomit.
Along the way, the movie manages to hilariously send up action movie clichés like the obligatory training montage sequence and Matrix-style fight scenes. There’s also an incredibly funny scene of puppet sex much raunchier than anything you’d see in Avenue Q (how raunchy? let’s just say it looks as if the Kama Sutra was used as reference material). And the puppet Kim Il Jung is actually oddly endearing, crooning about how lonely he is, except in his mangled pronunciation it comes out as “I’m so rone-ry” (as a somewhat unrelated aside, it's a little-known fact that Kim Il Jung was a big film buff in his youth and even wrote a well-regarded book on movies; one can only imagine what Kim Jong-Il’s reaction to Team America will be--if and when he sees it).
While Team America has some great moments in it, it isn’t as consistently funny in the way that a good episode of South Park can be. I can’t say whether the movie would have been any funnier if W. and his cronies were being lampooned with equal venom, but I do know there was a funnier movie in here somewhere; Parker and Stone just didn’t manage to find it.
Stars: **1/2
To an unprecedented degree, 2004 has been the year of the political movie. From Fahrenheit 9/11 to The Fog of War to several documentaries about both Kerry and Bush, filmmakers have decided to put their stakes in the ground this year and use their movies to express their political views.
The latest entrant in this year’s movie-as-political-soapbox derby comes from the twisted geniuses behind South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Knowing the pair’s reputation for irreverence and the film's title, you might think that Team America would be a parody America’s recent interventionist tendencies and feature a liberal (pun intended) sprinkling of potshots against President Bush and members of his Administration. But you would, in fact, be wrong.
While the movie does make fun of America’s clumsy efforts to maintain world peace—and I do mean clumsy, since the characters are all played by puppets with barely-articulated limbs—the real targets of this movie are actually Hollywood liberals who promote political issues like Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn. Far from criticizing America’s recent foreign policy, Team America actually winds up supporting it, as our heroes stop a mad Kim Il Jung bent on destroying the world by persuading the world's leaders that what America offers is considerably better than the anarchic alternative (not surprisingly, the argument for an interventionist America is made in much—and I do mean much--coarser language).
Team America unfolds with an elite fighting team being assembled to stop the world’s worst terrorists. To help their cause, they recruit Broadway actor Gary Johnston (voiced by Trey Parker), who’s reluctant to use his acting “powers” because he always ends up hurting people. After one mission ends badly, Gary quits the team, leaving them to face Kim Il Jung (voiced by Trey Parker) and his team of liberal Hollywood actor/flunkies (most of whom are voiced by—you guessed it—Trey Parker) all by themselves. Gary ultimately rejoins the team at their darkest moment, of course, but not before he hits bottom and lies sprawled face-down in a Bel Air mansion-sized pool of his own vomit.
Along the way, the movie manages to hilariously send up action movie clichés like the obligatory training montage sequence and Matrix-style fight scenes. There’s also an incredibly funny scene of puppet sex much raunchier than anything you’d see in Avenue Q (how raunchy? let’s just say it looks as if the Kama Sutra was used as reference material). And the puppet Kim Il Jung is actually oddly endearing, crooning about how lonely he is, except in his mangled pronunciation it comes out as “I’m so rone-ry” (as a somewhat unrelated aside, it's a little-known fact that Kim Il Jung was a big film buff in his youth and even wrote a well-regarded book on movies; one can only imagine what Kim Jong-Il’s reaction to Team America will be--if and when he sees it).
While Team America has some great moments in it, it isn’t as consistently funny in the way that a good episode of South Park can be. I can’t say whether the movie would have been any funnier if W. and his cronies were being lampooned with equal venom, but I do know there was a funnier movie in here somewhere; Parker and Stone just didn’t manage to find it.
Stars: **1/2
posted by Captain Nemo at 1:47 PM
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