Exceeds 'South Park' expectations

At this point, you probably know what you're going to think about "Team America: World Police" since it came from Colorado's own Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

The same litany that applies to the idiot-savant filmmakers' flagship franchise, "South Park" (especially the R-rated movie version), holds true for "Team America": offensive, juvenile, technically primitive, in exceedingly poor taste, profane, politically incorrect, gross, crude, absurd, mean-spirited, hysterically funny, evenhanded, intelligent and surprisingly poignant - applies for "Team America."

In fact, "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" is probably a better litmus test than point-checking any issues that might offend potential viewers because it shows how Parker and Stone flout good taste and challenge the limits of the "R" rating.

"Team America" might well exceed the benchmark the "South Park" movie set - 399 profane words (including 146 f-bombs), 128 offensive gestures and 221 acts of violence, according to the Internet Movie Database. And instead of depicting Saddam Hussein in a homosexual relationship with Satan, "Team America" reduces North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to a one-note Asian caricature who pronounces his l's as r's (and we wonder why the rest of the world hates us).

But people watch what Stone and Parker produce for more reasons than seeing how much righteous indignation they can cultivate.

If, like Kimberly, you considered the toothless "Shark Tale" a parody, "Team America" is a satirical fusillade that obliterates meatheaded jingoism, touchy-feely internationalism, Broadway and Hollywood with sociopathic glee.

Their "Team America" trick even echoes the high-tech way they produce the lowbrow "South Park" - and represents a backhand to movies like "Shark Tale" that combine cutting-edge computer animation with pablum scripts. Just as Parker and Stone use high-end Maya computer animation to create a cartoon that looks largely like construction-paper cutouts, they employ puppets for their high-concept parody.

This isn't by any stretch of the imagination a children's movie, and "Team America" doesn't consist of normal puppets: Even though the strings are visible at all times, they're hyper-realistic in a Sid and Marty Kroft, "Land of Confusion" kind of way. These certainly are no Muppets: Parker and Stone use puppets in ways that might make Dr. Sue Johannsen blush - or turn "Exorcist" director William Friedkin's stomach.

The puppets also allow the two to eviscerate their Hollywood enemies - literally, in one case. But in a way, Michael Moore gets off easier than the celebrities Parker and Stone skewer verbally as they lampoon blockbuster plots on their way to the same kind of "You know? I learned something today" vignette that usually closes "South Park."

Because it's not heavy-handed by Hollywood standards - and because it's easy to lose a somewhat subtle message about international politics and interpersonal relations in puppet porn, profanity and violence - it's easy to underestimate what "Team America" is saying.

And to me, the message, which involves three words that would get me fired from this newspaper, probably makes more sense than the one I gleaned from Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11" - that the answer to the world's problems lies in more bickering between political parties.

But you probably already knew that.