Making light of everyone and everything -- including terrorist attacks -- with marionettes

Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic

Friday, October 15, 2004

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Team America: World Police: Comedy. Starring Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Directed by Trey Parker. (R. 98 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
In "Team America: World Police," Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the hilarious "South Park" movie, take on the war on terror, using marionettes to satirize politicians and activists across the political spectrum. Surprisingly, the results are embarrassing. As puppetry, "Team America" is stilted. As satire, it's gutless and lazy. And as comedy, it barely delivers laughs.

To satirize something, it really does help to know that something inside- out. But "Team America" is neither inspired by nor operating from any kind of insight. Rather it seems based on a cultivated, self-satisfied ignorance, a reflexive mockery that comforts itself by seeing everything as one big joke. It neither talks truth to power nor pierces the pretensions of people who think they do. Rather, it mumbles nonsense, like a pothead giggling over a news broadcast.

Stone and Parker are taking on water from the first scene, in which terrorists have smuggled a suitcase nuke into Paris and are about to blow up the city. Maybe someone is comically gifted enough to find the humor in this situation, but not these guys. Team America shows up -- a true-blue band of square-jawed men and lethal, beautiful women -- and do battle with the terrorists. "Put down the weapon of mass destruction and get on the ground," one of them says. The joke falls flat.

Stone and Parker want to be equal-opportunity bashers. And so they mock the aggressiveness of American patriots, who'd destroy half of Paris in order to save it, just as they mock naive liberals who think everything can be solved through compromise and concession. The problem is that the filmmakers don't really understand either point of view. Insulated by what seems to be smugness, they merely trivialize the administration's war on terrorism, just as they misrepresent the politics of real-life Hollywood liberals, such as Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. Within this framework, both a paranoid right-wing operative and Michael Moore can be presented as idiots, not because either is wrong but because both actually care. They're not cool enough for apathy.

The irony is that Stone and Parker really do care about something in "Team America," something they know much more about than the topic they're satirizing. They care about popular culture. They know the conventions of action movies. And so they string together the movie cliches and try to milk them for laughs. Gary (the voice of Parker), an actor, is recruited by a covert government agency and assigned to go to the Middle East, posing as a terrorist. At first he doesn't want to go, but after a visit to the Lincoln Memorial and an interlude of corny country music on the soundtrack, he decides to risk it all for his country.

Unfortunately, the action-movie parody keeps running headlong into the grim topic of international terrorism, which will not soften for silly jokes. On his first assignment, Gary walks into a bar in Cairo, introduces himself and says, "I'm a terrorist. Anyone know of any terrorist attacks coming up?" It's supposed to be funny, but what's funny about it? That someone could be so stupid? The character's not defined enough for us to notice. That the filmmakers have the nerve to make a joke about terrorism? That's not enough.

While the animatronic faces of the marionettes are expressive, the bodies can barely move, a limitation that the filmmakers try to find comedy in. But the only real laughs are vulgar: A scene of a marionette vomiting in the street, and another of marionette eroticism. The plot is mishmash, involving plans by Korean strongman Kim Jong Il to join with terrorists and blow up the world's major cities. Hollywood actors -- members of the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.) -- also become involved. They travel to Hong Kong, espousing "talk and reasoning" as the solution to world terrorism. "That is the FAG way."

There's nothing honestly observed or politically astute about any of this. It's all just a mess, with scenes of Susan Sarandon shooting a machine gun at Special Forces guys and soldiers laying waste to everything. At a certain point, it seems that Stone and Parker may actually have a message to impart, and that's when it gets real scary -- something about there being three kinds of people in the world, etc.

There's no nice word for this. It's idiocy. I cringe at the thought of other countries seeing "Team America" and thinking we're all this ridiculous.