Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Team America: World Police (2004)
Director: Trey Parker
Movie review
From Time Out London
It’s been a long time since a comedy had me fearing for the seat I was sitting on, but watching a rabid assortment of soap-jawed marionettes solemnly swear, spew, and besmirch the civilised world under the bomb(t)astic rubrick of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’, I really got the willies. I understand this ranks me as a reactionary running-dog and impressionable delinquent – but at least I kept the chair clean.The missing – and debatably sarcastic – link between Washington’s special-ops ideal and Gerry Anderson’s prelapsarian Thunderbirds, Team America are a cracked terrorist-fighting task force whose defiance of WMD-toting mullahs tends to leave the likes of Paris and the Pyramids wasted anyway. Trey Parker and his ‘South Park’ accomplice Matt Stone sift through this ostensible contradiction in the accompanying rock anthem ‘America: Fuck Yeah!’
More candid than the sniggering schoolboy politics is Parker’s justifiable pride in how his painstaking (and often painstakingly crude) puppetry shows up the human performers in live-action Jerry Bruckheimer-style jingoist extravaganzas, as elaborated in the serenade ‘I Miss You (And ‘Pearl Harbor’ Sucked)’. Team America recruit a Broadway heartthrob to infiltrate the evil-doers, and discover a fifth column of hand-wringing Hollywood liberals in league with North Korea’s crazed leader Kim Jong II.
Better sustained than the ‘South Park’ movie, ‘Team America’ delivers both spot-on movie deconstruction and gleeful destruction. It also teaches that there are different levels of piss-taking. The film might send up American war-mongers’ cartoonish world-view – a world of ‘dicks, pussies and assholes’ – but the joke’s still on the pussies.
Author: NB
Time Out London Issue 1795: January 12-19 2005
Cast & crew
Director: Trey Parker
Producer: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Scott Rudin, Pam Brady
Genre(s): Comedy
Duration: 98 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
To the letter
Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.
Mind over matter
David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.
Fool's gold
Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.
We are the championed
Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."
A history of violence
Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.
True romantic
James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.
Playing in the dark
MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.
Junk bonds
Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.
What do you think?
Post your review now