TEAM AMERICA? HECK NO: Saw it. Was underwhelmed.
The good news first: the puppetry is ridiculously cool. If you appreciated Being John Malkovich for its puppetry, well, this puts it to shame.
The notorious puppet sex scene, and all the puppet vomiting? Awesome. (If you're into that sort of thing, which I am.)
The Rent parody? I liked it. "Montage"? Yes, okay, cute.
But as satire of Bruckheimer/action movie formula, it was decidedly unsophisticated and obvious, and as political satire, well, it was underwhelming. The whole [slang for male genitalia]/[slang for female genitalia]/[slang for anus] speech that's ostensibly the movie's point doesn't actually make much of a point -- it just says "sometimes America needs to kick ass, and sometimes we're clumsy at it, but no one else can do it," and, well, yawn.
More: Not only is the anti-Hollywood stuff juvenile -- the puppets neither look nor sound much like the actors being mocked. Having Kim Jong-Il pronounce all his l's as r's is just crude and unfunny stereotyping. And many of the jokes were recycled from the 1/3 as long, twelve times funnier Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants episode of South Park.
I am someone who adored South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. That movie was brilliant -- as political satire, as musical satire, and you even cared about the plot. There's nothing as memorable in this movie as the phrase "German schiesse video" or a relationship as nuanced and compelling as that between Saddam Hussein and Satan, and you will not be singing the songs from Team America for years on end.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have set really high standards for what we could expect from their work. Team America, sadly, is far closer to BASEketball than it was to SP:BLU, and moviegoers should severely lower expectations before they go see it.
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