Overall Rating
  Awesome: 56.51%
Worth A Look: 23.97%
Average: 8.9%
Pretty Bad: 6.85%
Total Crap: 3.77%
16 reviews, 196 user ratings
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| Team America: World Police |
by Robert Flaxman
"Don't court controversy if you don't know what to do with it."
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The germination for Team America: World Police evidently came after Trey Parker and Matt Stone saw an episode of "Thunderbirds" and decided that an action movie using puppets would be a great way to spoof action movies like those of Jerry Bruckheimer. It's not a bad idea, and if that's the only way Parker and Stone had gone, the film might have been outstanding. Instead, the pair decided to throw in their politics - such as they are - and moved the whole affair down several notches.Let's get it out of the way: for most of its running time, Team America is funny. Sometimes it's incredibly funny. Parker and Stone's action movie spoof, surprisingly, never runs out of gas - the clichéd dialogue wears a bit thin after a while, but they make up for that with other things, such as a meta-referential song about montages playing over the stereotypical training montage, or various references to the fact that these are puppets and not full-size people (perhaps the film's funniest moment comes when the "panthers" are called in to menace our heroes).
Still, it's not all great. Parker and Stone have always been big believers in swearing as a large part of humor. I'm not saying they're entirely wrong, but they routinely go overboard, and the same happens here. It's as if, tired of working under the constraints of basic cable, they try to fill their films with as many taboo words as they possibly can. The South Park movie was much worse on this count, but Team America turns on a speech you couldn't get on basic cable, and frequently features pointless profanity that seems to exist just because Parker and Stone think bad words are hilarious. Their attraction to scatological stuff isn't much better. Is a prolonged puppet vomiting scene really that funny?
This is not to say that vulgar equals bad necessarily. The infamous puppet sex scene is pretty funny, even if it's just the same joke being told in increasingly graphic fashion, and the Team America theme song is funny because of its profanity rather than in spite of it. These are pretty much the only two places where the film would have been unlikely to benefit from being toned down a little, though - the overly juvenile is rarely that amusing.
What's really wrong with Team America, though, has nothing to do with its number of four-letter words. The problem is the message - or rather, the lack thereof. Parker and Stone might have been content with just doing their action movie parody, but somewhere along the line they decided that going more controversial was the way to really get noticed. So rather than simply have a fairly straight spoof, they made the main characters members of a team ominously called "World Police."
The film's title sounds ironically left-leaning, and the first half of the film or so finds the team destroying other countries (including France and Egypt) in the name of fighting terrorism. It all seems very liberal - global intervention isn't a good thing for the United States, as it only causes more problems than it solves. When it turns out that the real terrorists are still at large and destroying the Panama Canal, the team looks like a failure.
Parker and Stone then do a 180º. In the film's second half, the two spend their time making fun of liberal Hollywood for its political activism, suggesting that celebrities are stupid, uninformed, and basically should shut their traps as regards politics. In some respects it's just over-the-top satire, such as when the celebrities level guns at the team, telling them this is the only way to achieve peace, but it's also a very nasty attack, and one that just doesn't make sense.
Why do Parker and Stone switch from seeming liberal to seeming conservative? It's pretty clear that the answer lies in what they don't believe, and not what they do. The two have not definitively aligned themselves with any political party, and if Team America is any indication, they seem to subscribe to a sort of political nihilism. They don't care about believing in anything themselves; they just care about mocking what others believe.
What they don't get is that for a critique to be taken seriously, it needs to offer an alternative to the position with which it finds fault. Team America doesn't do this, or at least, it doesn't do this effectively. The suggestion to liberal Hollywood is to stay out of political affairs and let those in charge take care of it - but this comes just minutes after the suggestion that those in charge are messing up the world more than they're fixing it. The inconsistency makes it impossible for a true position to be formed from the ideological mishmash that Parker and Stone present.
It would be easy to excuse the lack of a real philosophy by saying that the film is just supposed to be a puppet action spoof, but Parker and Stone left themselves open for criticism when they went the road of controversy. It's not like they didn't know what they were doing; the film's teaser gave a long list of liberal actors and political figures who, it proclaimed, were "all going to be really, really mad" upon seeing the film. The political content was obvious from minute one. A film that includes political content without taking a side is just taking the easy way out - it gets to trade on the controversy while theoretically providing something for everyone.
The film is more likely to infuriate both sides than it is to appease them, however. Of course, Parker and Stone's real audience is composed mostly of teenagers who could probably care less about politics. This doesn't excuse the copout, but you can understand why they did it. There's no reason to espouse actual political beliefs if you can get your core audience to laugh by mocking people for being involved with politics, right?Team America is, most of the time, a pretty funny film with some decent commentary on the action genre and a surprising amount of wit. However, it steps into the political arena and punches around blindly, not caring what targets it hits or whether it has anything to say itself, which it doesn't. Parker and Stone may court controversy, but they seem to have forgotten that real controversy derives from having an opinion, not just calling someone else's opinion stupid.
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10976&reviewer=385
originally posted: 10/20/04 12:00:37
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Starz Denver Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Starz Denver Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
15-Oct-2004 (R)
DVD: 17-May-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Dec-2004
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