Foul-mouthed 'Team America' dangles satire on a string

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

Team America: World Police (R) Two-and-a-Half Stars (Fair-to-Good) A silly, sophomoric — and intermittently funny— satire about America's anti-terrorism activities, starring a cast of string puppets, from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. Paramount, 98 minutes.

For its stars, "Team America" features a bevy of purposely crude string puppets — marionettes — that are nearly incapable of walking or shaking hands. "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are happy to let you see the strings and make several jokes out of the characters' immobility. However, the wooden dolls are entirely capable of copulation in at least a half-dozen Kama Sutra positions and of vomiting profusely (in one scene, for what seems like five minutes).

So how does the film work for older viewers? It probably depends on your tolerance for sophomoric humor and repetitive profanity. Your attitude toward "South Park" is another criteria. However, quite a bit of the film's political satire is surprisingly smart and amusing. The humor isn't sustained, but you might laugh, several times.

"Team America" opens brilliantly, as the red, white and blue warriors swoop down on Paris to attack four supposedly terrorist Arabs carrying a suspicious briefcase. Sure, they get 'em, but they also blow up the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre, obliterating most of a nation's culture in the cause of anti-terrorism.

After the prologue, the film's chief villain emerges as North Korea's Kim Jong Il, a funny caricature of a mad dictator. Jong is supposedly supplying terrorists the world over with nukes for a grand and glorious act that'll send the globe back to the Stone Age. "Team America" is dispatched to save the world.

Parker and Stone take a scattered and typically tasteless approach to their satire, painting targets on bad actors, Broadway plays, gays, political activists like Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn, and many others. (Surprisingly, they don't target Bush or Kerry directly, though a satire about our country's anti-terrorism activities is obviously anti-Bush.) "Team America" had to struggle to avoid a restricting NC-17 rating, and it just barely made it into the more commercial confines of an R. These may be puppets, but they're mighty foul-mouthed, sexually active and violent. (Who knew wooden puppets could contain so much blood?)

Even with an R rating (and just like the "South Park" movie), "Team America" embodies a classic irony: Its target audience is exactly the crowd supposedly restricted by its rating. And I suspect some parents everywhere will unwittingly lead their kids into the film simply because it features puppets. And even if the parents are smarter than that, you know "Team America" will be the movie of the season into which kids will want to sneak.

Rated R, with strong profanity, sex, innuendo, violence.