If you decide to go to the video store and rent "Team America: World Police," by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, be sure to get the uncensored/unrated version.
Parker and Stone are the guys who do the t.v. show "South Park," so in the spirit of their small-box work, their first objective with this 98-minute marionette show is to shock, offend, insult, belittle, and provoke as many people as possible. They succeed admirably.
The premise is that Kim Jong-Il, who gets a lot of face time and whose voice is done by Parker, has concocted a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction which he plans to distribute to Arab terrorists, so as to effect the destruction of the United States by proxy. That's the MacGuffin that drives this whole thing.
In order to counter this threat, the Team America commandos sally out from their fortress headquarters behind the iconic faces that front the heads of our four deified presidents at Mt. Rushmore and fly all over the world, shooting at Arabs to the mindless strains of the musical cheer/anthem, "America! Fuck, Yeah!"
Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah,
America, FUCK YEAH!
Freedom is the only way yeah,
Terrorist your game is through cause now you have to answer too
Unfortunately, the commandos are not always such great shots, and in their pursuit of terrorists they manage to destroy such monuments as the Eiffel Tower and one of the pyramids at Giza. Of course, who needed those antiques anyway?
Mindless fascism is not the only mind-set attacked by Parker and Stone. Michael Moore is a suicide bomber who blows himself up destroying the Team America home base, and Kim Jong-Il is aided and abetted by the numerous pretentious liberals of the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.), led by Alec Baldwin and including Jeanine Garofolo, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, and many others, who visit Pyongyang to assure the Korean dictator that they think he's really a good guy.
However, the high point of the movie, for me, was the five-minute sex scene involving the male and female protagonists, which included every possible position, water sports, and solid-waste activities. It's calculated to cause viewers who don't share the producers' irreverent outlook to scream bloody murder, but I believe Trey Parker is attempting to make a cogent philosophical point here.
Of course, Parker would most likely be offended if he knew I was accusing him of making a philosophical point, but I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time, and the point is this: people are offended and outraged by certain kinds of pornography, but is anyone offended any more by the pornography of war, violence and killing?
No, we aren't. Not ever. We're way past that point.
"Team America: World Police" is also a vehicle for lampooning movie cliches, especially in the action and romance genres, and film buffs will appreciate Parker's and Stone's relentless skewering of such tired devices as the montage and the climactic countdown clock which has to be disarmed to forestall the end of the world.
What I enjoyed most about this movie, though, was Parker's music, especially the slow, country-western ballad sung with a suitably cornpone peckerwood twang and accent, "Freedom isn't Free." It trots out every musical and ideological cliche to which all of us, the wise and the foolish, are subjected on a daily basis:
Freedom isn't free
It costs folks like you and me
And if we don't all chip in
We'll never pay that bill
Freedom isn't free
No, there's a hefty fuckin' fee.
And if you don't throw in your buck 'o five
Who will?
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