With “Team America: World Police” (Paramount), the new film from “South Park” co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the filmmakers echo 1998’s “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut” using an alternative medium. This time, their palette is puppets and their targets are action films, Hollywood actors, nationalist hubris and Kim Jong Il. “Team America” revolves around a titular elite task force and its hilariously inept and explosive struggle against world terrorism.
Stone spoke with The Hatchet about “Team America’s” unwillingness to fall into a partisan satirical standpoint.
“When you’re a celebrity and people ask you questions, you start to think you know everything about everything,” he said. “(Trey and I) know about making movies and now we know about making puppet movies, but I really don’t know anything about politics more than anybody else. I think we’re like most people, just down the middle with our personal political affiliation. Most people, unless you’re a rabid partisan, have mixed feelings about where America’s place is in the world.”
“Team America” gleefully takes the piss out of overblown, breathlessly stupid action films like those of director Michael Bay (“The Rock,” “Armageddon”), fricasseeing all of the genre’s conventions. All of the film’s characters fit into cookie-cutter. Parker and Stone elicit performances from their puppets that are just as effective and believable as the typical human action film cast. The film’s dialogue features painfully stupid one-liners (“Hey, terrorist! Terrorize this!”) and an entire song deconstructs Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” using the poor quality of the film as a metaphor for one character’s love of another. The fact that director of photography Bill Pope is the same man that shot all three “Matrix” films only adds to the joke.
The film also roasts the over-earnest political proclamations of actors like Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn. “We definitely tried to satirize what became, to us, the arrogance of Hollywood celebrities who can’t distinguish between their being famous for being good actors and thinking they actually know everything about the world there is to know,” said Stone.
The cartoonish portrayal of terrorists as gibberish-speaking and a choice subtitle that refers to Central America as being “south of the real America” lampoon the self-importance of post-9/11 American nationalism. The overwrought country singalong “Freedom Isn’t Free” and “America, Fuck Yeah!,” the chest-thumping Top Gun-style theme song of the film, also explode the balloon of mindless patriotism. And, as expected, the graphic puppet sex scene brought the house down.
All of the Parker/Stone conventions that made “Bigger, Longer and Uncut” so great are back in searing form. These days, when political trenches are being dug and everyone takes themselves much too seriously, the duo’s uniquely tasteless blend of high-minded satire and low scatological humor is just what the doctor ordered.
