“Whatchyu gonna do when we come for YOU now!!”
Twenty years ago, two wiseguys from Colorado known for that one slightly crude cartoon show decided to branch out into, of all things, puppets—with this piece that took on just about everyone in the midst of the War on Terror zeitgeist. As they would do in South Park, Matt Parker and Trey Stone spared few here, from mindlessly destructive war hawks to pretentious celebrities to actual dictators—but beyond the Bush years, how does Team America: World Police actually hold up?
In many ways, way more than you may think! First up is the very obvious ribbing on many an explosion-fuelled, geography-mangling, gagging-on-testosterone-overdose Hollywood action movies, with one supposed early concept of the film just being a remake of Armageddon with marionettes. Here, our heroes tend to cause mass destruction just by showing up at a location, like in the opening scene where central Paris is destroyed by missiles, well, missing constantly—and the same basic thing tends to happen in many a superhero film now, just that unlike here, it tends to be not commented on much.
And of course all foreign cultures here are reduced to the stereotypes an average couch potato would come up with—with French streets literally made of croissants, the Middle East looking like Aladdin, and so on. Perhaps in a way that would push things now, sure, but it’s obvious what they’re doing when a Latin American man responds to an oncoming catastrophe with ‘No me gusta!’. Twenty years on? Yeah, it’s still pretty much like that—with an attitude to linguistic and cultural accuracy present in many a mainstream flick that can be surmised as ‘pfft whatever’.
But what about the rest of the plot? Well, our story focuses on a Broadway actor named Gary (voiced by Trey…with him and Matt essentially doing the majority of the cast here!) who ends up being recruited by a paramilitary group of interventionist commandos who like to annihilate whole areas with airstrike and ask questions more or less never. After a riveting musical that boils down ‘Rent’ to its bluntest form, Gary ends up becoming an infiltrator into terrorist groups who may or may not be planning 9/11 multiplied by a ludicrous number—with opposing soon arising in the form of the North Korean government and Hollywood actors trying to show off just how liberal they are!
Depending how you look at it, the enjoyment or annoyance factor here is nobody being spared—as the film itself puts it, Team America are ‘reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks’, though their targets range from genuine maniacs to those so hung up on their own politics in different way. Beyond that, the United Nations, Michael Bay, the musical Cats, country music, Ben Affleck, and others end up being skewed in the bluntest way possible—and more importantly, very memorably indeed, for Matt and Trey have at least understood that if you want to stand out in the satire scene, it’s either going as absurd as possible, or going home. And when you have sharks eating puppets or going up against kitten ‘killer panthers’, well, it’s sure as hell memorable!
And, well, in this age where things have only got more polarized since the 2000s, where social media mindsets dictate that things can only be absolutely one way or another—there is something to consider about a message that boils down to actually considering what approaches might work for differing situations. As Gary puts it in a…erm…afar cruder way at the finale.
What really seals the enjoyment factor is how the film strikes that balance of dead serious dialogue with dramatic orchestral music combined with silly accents, languages consisting of three words, and, well, puppetry—the best sorts of satires are those that just highlight their targets and just take them to the logical extreme. One side or another can be overdone in others here, but this is where for me at least, it manages to work. And, well, let’s face it, the songs end up getting stuck in your head forever—because it can’t be denied, the movie Pearl Harbor did undeniably suck.
And, well, that sums it all up—on a day where many must remember that freedom isn’t free, for it costs precisely a buck o’five.
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