Team America: World Police

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2004 at Loews Harvard Square #4 (first-run)

It is both oddly gratifying and embarrassing when you're the only person in a theater to laugh at a gag (at least, it is when you're not the only person in the theater). In Team America, that happened when I was getting all the nerd humor flying past the other audience members: Like when a group of evil actors led by Tim Robbins yells out a Klingon battle cry, or a bar in Cairo looks exactly like Mos Eisley cantina. There's something very fun about having jokes just for me.

Of course, Team America wouldn't be much of a movie if it didn't have jokes aimed at a somewhat wider segment of the audience, too. And it does, in part because Trey Parker and Matt Stone's sense of humor very often skews toward the juvenile. While that's not sophisticated, it is fairly universal. You may feel silly laughing at some of the jokes, but that they got you to laugh is enough.

The movie aspires to be half political commentary and half action-movie parody, doing a better job with the latter task. As silly as action movies often are, one would think lampooning them would be easy, but it's really not - a parody has to keep the basic structure of what it sends up, and the action-movie trappings have a tendency to prove effective even when you're trying to joke about them. That's where the decision to use marionettes is actually kind of brilliant - as soon as someone might start to get sucked into Team America as an action movie, there's an obvious string or "panthers" or a ridiculous sex scene that points up the ridiculousness of the whole endeavor. While early on in the movie I thought it might be better if they didn't make the use of marionettes so obvious, I've got to say it serves a purpose.

The political satire may come off as weak because Parker & Stone don't exactly take a hard line. On the one hand, it's hard to miss the swath of destruction and bad feelings Team America leaves in its wake, or the goofy way foreigners are caricatured in a story told from an American point of view. But the filmmakers seem to have much greater contempt for actors who use their celebrity to spout off like they are some sort of expert, and when a character justifies Team America's military adventurism by asking whether having the ability to fight the bad guys but not doing so is wrong, there's no mockery to it. It's somewhat trite to say good satire offends everyone, but there is certainly something in this movie for everyone to feel ticked off about.

As with South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, the songs in Team America are pretty hilarious. Sadly, the funniest ("The Montage Song") won't be eligible for an Oscar nomination, as it's evidently recycled from a South Park episode, but pretty much all of them, from the anthem "America, Fuck Yeah!" to the bizarre song by Kim Jong-Il that runs over the end credits, are hilarious and strangely hummable. The puppet work by the Chiodo Brothers (best known for Killer Klowns From Outer Space) is pretty decent, too; the characters are oddly expressive, even if the way they walk is deliberately awkward.

Team America: World Police is hardly a perfect movie; it crisscrosses the line between "campy, but amusingly so" and "campy, but annoyingly so" roughly four dozen times. It does deliver some fairly big laughs, though, and seeing as that's it's job, good for it.