Team America: World Police
Many times when it comes to political satire, the writers and creators of said humor will almost blatantly resort to projecting their own point of view completely from only one side of the political spectrum, resulting in the alienation and disgust of at least half of their audience (the past 20 years of Saturday Night Live has been VERY representative of that) with most of the acceptable mainstream examples almost always coming from the far left as they rip up and shred to pieces their intended âultra right wingâ political targets to largely more and more unfunny effect, while the rare instances of conservative humor (which comes off as being better simply because they are just so rare) do just the opposite. Enter Trey Parker and Matt Stone, whose brilliantly offensive animated TV show South Park always strives to piss off as many parties as humanly possible (right OR left), who saw a chance to do a movie comedy in their own unique way, and moreso, decided to do so while using PUPPETS, namely the kind best remembered from the old Thunderbirds marionette shows of the 60s which were remembered as being incredibly earnest but also amazingly cheesy, literally asking the viewer to take seriously these not so lifelike creations attached to obvious strings complete with their bizarre looking way of walking and even more hilarious emoting tactics if a particular scene became too âdramaticâ. Parker and Stone originally set out to adapt the script for The Day After Tomorrow (which both of them thought was terribly overwrought to begin with) but after being talked out of it when Roland Emmerich took on the project as a major (live action) motion picture, they wisely decided to come up with their own original story, taking as their inspiration the so called âwar on terrorâ initiated by The Bush Administration in the days after 9/11 (in which almost every neo con around Bush himself almost seemed to regard as being some kind of a âholy warâ), but they also took aim at the Hollywood liberal establishment itself who would seem to take almost every opportunity to blast our leaders and their gung ho approach to warfare simply by proclaiming that their views were the correct ones which we should all believe in because, hey, we all enjoy watching the movies that they act in, right? It was this simplistic yet arrogant mentality that had brought about the bitingly sarcastic sense of humor that the movie entails, and using real life actors as (puppet) characters is what mainly necessitated them NOT doing this story as a live action project. The story begins with an eerily prescient (the film was released in 2004!) terrorist attack on Paris, as the infidels open fire with machine guns on the scurrying citizenry while carrying a dreaded WMD inside a briefcase. In flies Team America to the rescue (consisting of the wimpy milquetoast leader, the blond bombshell lead female, the hardass shit talker always wearing sunglasses, the sensitive female with naturally clairvoyant tendencies, and the doomed one who is killed here) and they engage the bad guys in an extended battle scene where they use their high tech weaponry to do more damage to the city than the actual terrorists do, winning the day but leaving Paris itself in fiery ruins. Back at their Mount Rushmore headquarters, their suit and tie boss (a melding of literally every âtypeâ of this kind of character in cinema history) decides that they now need the best actor that he can find to do extended infiltration work as a Islamic terrorist, which brings him to Broadway to recruit Gary Johnston (Parker), who is currently starring in your typical wimpy Broadway musical called Lease and singing passionately about how everyone he knows has AIDS as part of the show. Once heâs brought in, he goes undercover to find out what the terrorists have planned, only to discover a more disturbing truth: that all the worldwide terror cells are being brought together by none other than North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (Parker again) with the master plan being for him to distribute WMDs to the terrorists all over the world (an actual point of concern that our government had in real life) and then have them denonated all simultaneously in various locations around the planet so that the whole world will be thrown into an insane third world chaos, and those who remember Parker and Stoneâs vicious skewering of Saddam Hussein in the South Park movie will see that same amount of ballsy, fearless venom directed towards Kim as well, playing up his wish to destroy mankind based off of his own ferocious sense of massive insecurity. But whatâs even worse is that the elite of Hollywoodâs liberal movie star community has now joined up with Kim as well, not only supporting his actions but also going over to North Korea to also act as his HENCHMEN, driven no doubt by their misguided notions that doing so will somehow help ensure world peace. This also means that during the final battle on Kimâs palace we get to witness Team America brutally take out these movie stars one or two at a time in an extremely gory fashion, and the big names targeted here include George Clooney, Matt Damon (portrayed as being retarded since his puppet came out looking that way), Janeane Garofalo, Danny Glover, Ethan Hawke, Helen Hunt, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon (who gets the best death scene), Martin Sheen, and Liv Tyler, along with their âleaderâ, Alec Baldwin (portrayed here as being the greatest living actor in the world) all leading up to Kim himself sitting squarely in the âBossâ position. And while Parker and Stone do more than their part to decimate the Hollywood Liberalsâ images (and egos) here, the truth is that the (much more subtle) targeting of the supposed âneo conservative warhawkâ mindset is also on display too, from the aforementioned disregard for the lands and homes of the very people that theyâre trying to âsaveâ, to all sorts of (purposely) inane dialogue exchanges amongst the members of Team America themselves, portraying them as being as simple minded in personality as the caricatures that they were always intended to be, along with a wild, out of control sex scene between two of the main puppets that in many ways crosses the line of good taste completely. However, some bits do get a little tired and / or annoying (the boss / chief character of âSpottswoodeâ is a little hard to take in any discernible way), but what Parker and Stone are really going for here is just a no holds barred spoof of the entire over the top action movie genre (most notably the extended works of Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer) and that is something which they do brilliantly, skewering everything through both direct and indirect references to everything from Star Wars to Armageddon, and being able to do so at such a pace that it rarely allows for either them or the viewer to ever be able to come up for air, and the raucous theme song âAmerica! Fuck Yeah!â is absolutely reflective of this particular mindset. Even as the post 9/11 world regularly featured nightly news reports on the likelihood of further (worse) terrorist attacks on our own soil that would never come to fruition, the majority of us had merely decided to simply just accept our added security measures (like The Patriot Act) all while wanting nothing more to do with any of this except to just move on with our own damn lives, thus bringing into question the idea of whether we should even engage in a war over political and religious ideologies thatâs currently taking place halfway around the world (certainly none of the soldiers killed in combat over the past 15 years actually died for OUR âfreedomâ) and regardless of the circumstances that led to the recent terror attacks in Paris, the fact remains that America once again âleading the chargeâ against foreign nations in the seemingly never ending fight against worldwide terror just makes us that much more of a target for them, which means that perhaps we should probably tread a little more lightly when it comes to these kinds of global conflicts and to start allowing other countries (such as France) to do more of the heavy lifting from now on, which thus makes it all the easier for us to concentrate more on keeping our own country safe and secure and to not have to be forced to sacrifice any more American lives on such a big global stage where many will always try to say that we are not needed or wantedâŚ
9/10