America, fuck yeah! Comin’ again to save the motherfucking day, yeah! / America, fuck yeah! Freedom is the only way, yeah! / Terrorists, your game is through, ’cause now you have to answer to / America, fuck yeah! So lick my butt and suck on my balls! / America, fuck yeah! What you gonna do when we come for you now!
Directed by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Team America: World Police is a tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless politically biting send-up of the CGI-laden, big-budget action movies that have taken an almost exclusive hold over mainstream box offices, particularly during the summer months. Inspired by the Thunderbirds, a popular 1960s children’s series, Team America: World Police uses similarly styled, but significantly more crass, marionette puppets in lieu of computer-generated images to breath life into an elite group of adventurers known as Team America. Their mission: to travel the world, root out its terrorists, and keep evil at bay. Aside from intentionally employing all of the hallmarks of standard action-adventure blockbuster formulas, from a prototypical hero to his communist arch-rival, the film also boasts the occasional musical number. ~ Tracie Cooper, Rovi
Whether you love or hate the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, you have to hand it to them for coming up with movie and the way they made it. Yes, the movie is entirely composed of puppets kicking ass and saying wildly racists and satirical things in one of my favorite movies. It is a technical feat of precision and care that only the creators of South Park could come up with. It somehow makes what happens in the movie even funnier and far more offensive considering we can’t get angry or upset with puppets making offensive jokes.
Team America is really, some would say satire, rather poignant take on our “patriotism” and mentality to a whole new level. Lampooning just about everybody in the world is no small feat, but they seem to have the vulgarity and slams down to a sweet science. Whether it is over the top accents for the terrorists and villain of the movie, to the portrayal of the brash and uncaring American machismo on display, or the liberal browbeating that ensues when they turn their sights on Hollywood elite, Team America just goes after everything possible. The writing, jokes, and delivery are vulgar and spot on. Delivered so naturally from the creators of the movie, Team America certainly has a lot of moments of quotable material while making some salient points amongst the fucks and shits of the movie.
I realize some people find their humor not to their liking, which is fine, but this will certainly offend more than anything else. You just have to laugh at it all, I mean it’s puppets done in the style of The Thunderbirds, lobbing racists and offensive remarks one right after the other. It also manages to poke fun at our chest-thumping in such an audacious way that you can’t take it personal. Trey and Matt are just absolute geniuses when it comes to turning their wit and satire on the public masses. Team America World Police is both, for me anyways, a highly entertaining comedy with amazing musical numbers and inventive action sequences that must have taken forever to do with puppets.
If you haven’t seen this, that is just plain Un-American.
