TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE is a parody of action movies, performed entirely with marionettes. This is very funny in spurts, and it has moments of true comedic inspiration throughout, but there is overall a repetitiveness (sometimes very literal) and an extraordinarily smug mean-spiritedness that grows increasingly grating. Director Trey Parker and his co-writers Matt Stone & Pam Brady all of SOUTH PARK fame mingle brilliance with overkill (and some hypocrisy).

Team America is the name of an anti-terrorist unit that operates out of a hidden (but apparently not all that secret) base in Mount Rushmore. Flying all over the world in their red, white and blue superhero aircraft, Chris (voiced by Stone), Lisa (voiced by Kristen Miller), Sarah (voiced by Masasa), Joe (voiced by Parker) and Carson (Parker again) hunt down and destroy evil terrorists. So what if they blow up the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum in the process? But then tragedy strikes and the team needs a new man. Enter the unwitting Gary (another Parker voice), an actor famous for his turn in the Broadway musical LEASE (his big upbeat number is "Everyone Has AIDS!"). Recruited by Team America boss Spottswoode (voiced by Daran Norris in Charlton Heston mode), Gary isn't too sure about serving his country in this manner, but his acting talents (badly disguised as a Middle Eastern terrorist with a U.S. Midwestern accent, patchy beard and blue eyes, he naturally fools everybody) save the day and win the heart of teammate Lisa. But then a Team effort goes badly, people are killed and Gary's favorite actor, Alec Baldwin (voiced by Maurice LaMarche), denounces the violent anti-terrorist squad on TV. A demoralized Gary quits, leaving the team to face their next mission without an actor as evil genius Kim Jong Il of North Korea (Parker's voice once more) plots to blow up most of the world, using a Film Actors Guild show as a distraction.

The filmmakers are very fond of and conversant with action movie clichés their eye for detail is impressive, as when at the outset, a little boy with an ice-cream-stained face is stopped in his tracks by a glaring terrorist. Marionettes engaged in martial arts combat are very funny; puppet sex is over-the-top hilarious. There are also a number of swell satirical ballads by Parker and composer Marc Shaiman that are acutely on-target in their skewering of both the tradition of inspirational soundtrack entries and the actual function of the songs: "Montage" cheerfully points out everything that we're meant to take in from the editing tricks in a musical segment, and there's a romantic torch number that soundly thrashes PEARL HARBOR (the singer compares how bad he feels about losing his girlfriend to the quality of that particular action film). There's an anarchistic glee to the way our heroes blithely and obliviously cause as much or more damage than the terrorists they so righteously chase.

On the downside, though, TEAM AMERICA tends to recycle its own gags ad infinitum, as though the repetition itself is a running joke. Yes, action movies can keep punching the same button over and over, but to replicate this flaw tends to eventually produce exactly the same annoying effect. The movie also (like SOUTH PARK) uses and abuses real public figures to an extent that's really off-putting (a putdown of actors for expressing their opinions publicly is particularly egregious, since Parker and Stone are expressing their own opinions in every frame of the film), not least because most of the people aren't known for doing anything remotely like what they're shown doing here it's insult for insult's sake without a punchline. Finally, there are too many long stretches (that come increasingly close together as the movie continues) where the filmmakers rely too heavily on the novelty of having action movie riffs performed by puppets without actually shaking things up with a strong joke. Yes, it's funny to see puppet gore and hear marionettes swear for awhile, but eventually, it would be good to get something besides more of the same.

Norman Tempia's puppet design is smashing the characters have nuanced expressions and appropriately owe a great deal of their look to Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds. Jim Dultz also did a sterling job with the production design, cleverly creating puppet-world replicas of various landmarks with a marriage of lifelike observation and satirical whimsy.

Parker & Stone previous brought forth SOUTH PARK THE MOVIE: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT. While TEAM AMERICA is unquestionably more sophisticated visually and technically, it lacks SOUTH PARK's sense of genuine outrageousness and narrative surprise. In illustrating the evils of cookie-cutter big-budget blow-up blowouts, TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE is a little too faithful it gets petty and predictable instead of witty and startling.