After suffering through mornings filled with daily tracking polls, enduring lunches engrossed in political conversation and bearing the evening news' coverage of the candidates' daily foibles and attacks, one can get a bit sick of the 2004 election. The doctor recommends one remedy, whether the patient is red, blue or purple in the face: Team America: World Police will reveal all the idiocies of American politics and cure the patient without fail.
The medicine's recipe—the film's plot—is remarkably simple. The five patriotic, all-American members of Team America jet around the world throughout the movie, blowing up anything in their path as they search for allusive terrorists. A terrorist is aptly portrayed as the cliché grungy Middle-Eastern male, with a black beard, a turban, and a gun in his hand, while Team America's members are stereotypically blond, blue-eyed movie stars decked out in pink and blue camouflage combat pants. But Team America is unaware of the real mastermind behind the attacks: North Korea's Kim Jong Il. Somehow, America must save the world once again—but how?
The answer to that question is secondary, at best, to the film's two main attributes: the hilarious satire of all things American and the fact that the actors are puppets. Yes,puppets—with the strings, the funny, awkward walking legs and the plastic faces. The puppets blow up terrorists, they fly their patriotic warplanes around the world, they destroy national monuments and they engage in some erotic puppet lovin'.
No one is spared from the satire of the film's creators, South Park duo Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Kim Jong Il takes a leading role, singing his hit single "I'm So Lonely” and feeding United Nations' weapons inspector Hans Blix to his pet sharks. Alec Baldwin and the Film Actors Guild are continually popping up in an effort to thwart Team America's mission to destroy the world's peoples in the name of freedom. Oh, and not to mention Team America's trusty computer I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. whose enigmatic nature alludes to the ambiguity of the "intelligence” the U.S. uses as its basis for hunting terrorists.
The movie's soundtrack is a fantastic compliment to the film. The token song, "America [expletive] Yeah,” a resounding chorus of vulgar epithets and loud rock chords, screams America's mission to the skies whenever Team America flies off from their headquarters in Mount Rushmore. A parody of the classic "Freedom Isn't Free” is played whenever the puppets doubt their duty to their country, giving them the spirit they need to shoot that gun one more time.
Mysteriously absent from the movie is our beloved President. Why Parker and Stone left out the easiest joke of all is anyone's guess. Regardless, Team America: World Police will leave you laughing so uproariously at America that you won't care who won on Nov. 2. America will continue to police the world no matter who sits in the Oval Office.
Team America: World Police is rated R for crude language, sexual scenes and gratuitous violence
Sally Lanar. Sally Lanar finally is, after four long years, a senior in the CAP. When not canvasing Blair Blvd or the SAC for sources, she enjoys reading, writing short stories and poems and acting. She is also a self-declared francophile and would vouch for a French … More »
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