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Team America: World Police
Directed by Trey Parker. In a nutshell: South Park meets puppety Thunderbirds. Running Time: 1hr 38 minutes. Certificate 15.
Movies like Team America: World Police make my life so easy. All I need to tell you is that your opinion of South Park is applicable here. Although made with puppets instead of cartoons, the same people made it and the sense of humour is exactly the same and so the audience will be the same too.
I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: (South Park fans will love it though) Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: Extensive bad language, sex references, one puppet sex scene (that they had to tone down to get it rated, believe it or not!), extremely un-PC. To enjoy this film you should: like South Park - that's essential
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Cast: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Kristen Miller, Masasa.
Team America pitches two styles simultaneously. For the first part, it is careful to show that a lot of care has been
taken in the set design, puppet characteristics and attention to detail, so that it all looks like
a painstakingly created model railway - the sort of approach that gives you a new detail every time you look at it.
On top of that, there is a brash layer of parody and self-mockery, deliberately exploiting the crapness of puppets
for comedy value. Thus in the opening scene, there is a recreation of Paris in puppet form, with puppets on bikes, in cars
and on foot, surrounded by hundreds of Parisian buildings, to show what care has been taken. Later in the same scene,
the strings on the puppets are clearly visible and the characters run in a hovery-wobbly-don't-forget-I'm-a-puppet kind of
way, because it's funnier that way. It takes the first ten minutes to get used to this approach, but once you're dialled in,
it works very well and never fails to raise a chuckle.
Much of the fun of Team America is in the sending up of America itself, with the gung-ho heroes fighting the "terr-rists"
in the style of many a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. With songs like "America - f**k yeah!", it's clear that the South Park
team are more than happy to poke fun at themselves. It could be argued that there are political points being made, but as
all the characters are mocked equally and everyone is made to look silly, I think it's just a bit of harmless fun.
Unless that's the point, of course, that everyone is silly ... but it doesn't matter, because it's very funny anyway.
Trey Parker clearly knows a lot about showing emotion on screen, as a great deal is conveyed by the smallest movements
(like South Park - one line on a face n the right place changes the emotion completely) - and the puppeteers create these
moments beautifully. The scene where the hero gives the "distress signal" of waving his arms around like he's drowning
is hilarious solely due to the puppeteers' skill (I'm laughing again just thinking about it now).
To sum up, Team America: World Police is a great laugh and is just the tonic for a jaded reviewer who's bored with
Hollywood claptrap like
