October 14-20, 2004

movies

Yanked

JERKED AROUND: Puppets fight terror, and actors, in Team America: World Police.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone pull the strings, and stack the deck, in the uneven Team America.

by Sam Adams

Bringing new meaning to the term "puppet government," Team America is a crack cadre of marionettes fighting evil and actors to secure the American way.

Wait a minute: actors?

Yes indeed. In Team America: World Police, the second feature from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the only thing as dangerous as a terrorist with weapons of mass destruction is a Hollywood liberal with a conscience and time between films.

On the orders of their stentorian commander, Spottswoode (voiced by Daran Norris, channeling Troy McClure), the five-person team flies to Paris (identified as "3,615 miles east of America") and makes short, if messy, work of a handful of gibbering, suitcase-toting Arabs. If they happen to destroy the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre in the process, well, the world ought to be grateful all the same.

But it soon emerges that the Paris operation, as well as a subsequent sortie into, uh, "Derkaderkastan," is but a diversion staged by the real mastermind: North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, voiced by Parker as a cross between Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Elmer Fudd. Despite a tendency to express his loneliness in song (repeating the South Park movie), Team America’s Kim is a nasty sort, especially when he joins forces with the worst America has to offer: the Film Actors Group. (Work out the initials on your own.)

Headed by Alec Baldwin (a brilliant Maurice LaMarche), and including the likes of Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen and Janeane Garofalo (not to mention erstwhile South Park booster George Clooney), the actors fall easily under Kim Jong Il’s spell, inadvertently abetting his plan to gather world leaders at a phony "peace conference" while he plots the largest terrorist attack in history: what Spottswoode ominously forecasts as "9/11 times a thousand." As a square-headed Robbins launches vague attacks against corporations which "sit there in their corporate buildings and get all corporationy," Kim throws Hans Blix into the shark tank and plots to destroy the world.

Luckily, Team America has a thespian on its side: blue-eyed Gary (Parker), a corn-fed Nebraskan recruited right off Broadway. Perhaps Team America’s funniest running gag is the way the team treats Gary’s like a superpower, as in "Quick, Gary! Act your way past those guards." That’s apart from Chris (Stone), who’s hostile to all things actorly. Along with a couple of love triangles, one consummated graphically enough to briefly earn the movie an NC-17, that provides Team America with the requisite team conflicts and painful backstories, forecasting any number of big-eyed flashbacks and teary monologues.

The bastard offspring of Jerry Bruckheimer and Thunderbirds’ Gerry Anderson, Team America is at times an eerily perfect re-creation of Bruckheimer’s trademark jingo-fests, although the acting in Team America, whose marionettes have fleshy, remote-control faces to go with their knobby limbs, is significantly above the Bruckheimer standard. When the movie plays it straight, the effect is rivaled only by Todd Haynes’ all-Barbie Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. From one perspective, the movie is the biggest art-film hoax played on a major studio since Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot Psycho remake.

The trouble is that Parker and Stone, along with co-writer Pam Brady, can’t seem to decide whether to keep their collective tongue in cheek or blow raspberries. Such ambivalence led to an eleventh-hour change of composers, from South Park alum Marc Shaiman to Bruckheimer veteran Harry Gregson-Williams, who substitutes recycling for parody. (Matrix veteran Bill Pope’s cinematography is likewise up the middle.) The scenes which bring Kim’s vision of global Armageddon to life are, puppets or no, too affecting to pass as parody. But when he unleashes a pair of "panthers" on the Team Americans and two harmless kittens pounce, silliness reigns supreme.

Parker and Stone style themselves as equal opportunity offenders, and Team America launches darts at both its bullish anti-terrorist crusaders and its credulous peaceniks. But their obvious affection for Team America’s knucklehead pre-emption contrasts sharply with the venomous attacks on left-coast liberals (although it’s pretty funny when the Team Americans start turning the actors into bleeding puppet meatbags). Depicting Michael Moore as a hot-dog waving suicide bomber isn’t just unfair; it’s unfunny.

Despite the anti-Pearl Harbor screed which hijacks a love ballad, Parker and Stone’s fondness for America the lunkheaded is unmistakable. As they put it in characteristic fashion: "It takes a dick to fuck an asshole." Those who disagree are, of course, "pussies." Anatomy aside, there’s a real argument being advanced under cover of smut, and basically it’s this: You’re either with the puppets or against them. Too bad Team America doesn’t ask who’s pulling the strings.

Team America: World Police

Directed by Trey Parker A Paramount release Opens Friday at area theaters