Details
- Title
- Team America: World Police
- Director
- Trey Parker
- Cast
- Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Kristen Miller, Masasa, Daran Norris, Phil Hendrie, Maurice LaMarche
- Length
- 98 min.
- Released
- 2004
Review
Not half so funny as it ought to be, nor half so offensive as it could have been. In fact Trey Parker talking to Rolling Stone, "It's a back-and-forth with the [ratings] board.... We love the golden shower, but I guess they said no to that. But I just love that they have to watch it. Seriously, can you imagine getting a videotape with just a close-up of a puppet asshole, and you have to watch it?" is way funnier than anything in the movie.
This is not to say that Team America is not funny. It is. It's just that the concept had so much more than they worked out of it. It could have been more Dr. Strangelove and less Farrelly brothers. Though the integrity of the satire (be it political or filmic) is undermined by the endless mugging, some of the jokes stand pretty well on their own. The puppet proportion jokes are pretty good, with Kim Jong-Il's killer jaguars being especially funny. Parker and Stone also boast the second best film-structure joke of the year, behind Dodgeball's deus ex machina, with their song about montage.
The film doesn't parody current world politics (there isn't even a George Bush puppet) nearly as much as it parodies heroic action movies. That they stick so closely to the Michael Bay formula they mock cuts off the possibility of being a great movie in its own right. But as a parody, it's not sharp enough to be satire, it is pretty good.
Kind of wish it were just a close-up of a puppet asshole, though.
- Rating
- 4/8
- Reviewer
- Pat Jackson
- Published