The Weird and The Wacky Meet

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Politically Incorrect or Politically Incoherent?

Team America Misses the Point

                 The world of Team America: World Police is a very simple one.  It’s a place where nothing is funnier than puppets puking and anyone who cares about the world enough to take sides politically is a fool worthy of ridicule.  It features nihilistic politics played for maximum offensiveness, with potshots hurled at all sides that fall flat without hitting their marks.  But, somehow, it’s just not funny.

                 Team America is the latest movie from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, best known as the creators of South Park.   Now they’ve moved from animating crude Colorforms stickers to sophisticated, one-third scale marionettes straight out of the old Thunderbirds TV series that inspired them.  Yes, every character is a literal puppet, complete with visible strings and wooden acting.  The mobile dolls look just realistic enough to be creepy, especially during the sex scene that almost gave this movie an NC-17 rating.

                 The Team America of the title is a group of heavily-armed superheroes or homeland security agents or international police.  We can only guess, since it’s never made exactly clear what they are, why they have the authority they do or who they answer to.  It’s a comedy, so we’re not supposed to sweat the fine points, but this omission serves only to make these characters’ motivations opaque and actions senseless.  Interestingly, neither the military nor the White House are shown, giving them a free pass.

                 What we do know about Team America is that they race around the globe in glorified action toys –flag-themed SUV’s, helicopters, jets, and motorcycles – protecting America by killing innocent bystanders and inadvertently destroying landmarks and anything else of cultural value that finds itself in their sights.  If there didn’t seem to be such glee in blowing up the intricate miniature sets, it could pass as a commentary on the collateral damage our war against terrorism has caused and how deeply we’ve riled the potential terrorists and offended even our allies.  However, that point gets lost in the “rocking” anthem “America!  F*** Yeah!”

                 This love of explosions is taken to absurd lengths as, in the battle against our enemies at home and abroad, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and even the Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx are destroyed.  In return, we lose the Panama Canal and Mount Rushmore to domestic and foreign terrorists.

                 The movie’s plot is supposed to be a satire of the sort of mindless, formulaic action movies that Jerry Bruckheimer is known for, but just winds up repeating their clichés without rising above them or providing anything deeper than a few occasional chuckles.  After one such cliché – the death of a team member right after he finally declares his love for another – they rush to Broadway to recruit the protagonist, Gary Johnston, an actor whose “double-major in theater and world languages” makes him a natural, if reluctant, spy.

                 In showing his somewhat bumbling attempts to impersonate an Arab terrorist, the movie could have been making a point about how clueless we are when it comes to understanding other cultures, but that’s belied by the insulting gobblygook that’s passed off as a funny version of Arabic.  After dispatching terrorists from a (naturally) fictional Mideastern country, Team America goes on to fight their weapons supplier, Kim Jong Il, who is planning a terrorist attack that would be "9/11 times 2,356."  I am not sure what is more offensive; using 9/11 as such a cheap shot or the gross bigotry in the perverted Asian lisp of the Jong Il puppet.

                 It’s around here that the film loses all focus and begins to simply attack all possible targets.  Supporting Jong Il as traitors are puppet portrayals of outspoken liberal actors such as Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarrandon, and Helen Hunt, all members of the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G., get it?).  This homophobic humor is a mainstay that they rely on for cheap laughs whenever they run low on amusing bodily functions.  Likewise, Michael Moore is trivialized as a “Socialist weasel” and made out to be a lunatic suicide bomber.  Apparently, if there’s anything worse than unnecessary violence in the defense of American interests, it’s daring to publicly question this violence.

                 I originally thought that the movie was trying to be ironic by having an actor join the team, but the disrespect they show other actors who voice their opinions publicly undoes this.  Somehow it’s okay for Johnson to have an opinion and blow up terrorists, but if other actors raise their voices for peace, it makes them weak.  This self-contradiction is completely missed by the intended audience, which seems to consist of boys who laugh at puppet vomit.

                 Not that there aren’t moments that are funny; they just get lost in this mess of the movie.  The nihilistic “no one should care” message drowns out genuine humor like the Rent parody song, “Everyone Has AIDS” or the “Pearl Harbor Sucked and I Missed You” number.  Staying out of the political arena and focusing on films and plays is where the movie works best, because Parker and Stone genuinely understand the entertainment industry but only have an angry teen’s grasp of politics.  Since they don’t understand the ideas, they can only attack the people, focusing on the most superficial things, such as Michael Moore stuffing hot dogs into his mouth with both hands or Alec Baldwin coming across as egotistic.

                 To the extent that the movie has a coherent message, it’s that anyone who has an adult understanding of these issues is taking them too seriously.  It’s not that it takes issue with those on the extremes of the political spectrum for being so out of touch, but that it denigrates the whole idea that someone could be right, offering only scatological humor as an alternative to what it attacks.

                 Successful satire is based on piercing insights into the target’s weaknesses, offering humorous criticism more powerfully than any dry essay could manage.  But, by embracing political nihilism while ridiculing politics, the movie makes itself irrelevant, shallow and – worst of all – unfunny.

                 Roger Ebert said it better than I ever could, “At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides -- indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they're wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn't matter.”  What they actually wind up revealing is that it’s lightweight fluff like Team America that doesn’t matter.

 

2 out of 5 Stars

Copyright 2005

Puppetry:  The Lost Art

By Amanda Evans

Date: 11/29/04