by Scott Tobias
A.V. Club
“Freedom isn’t free / No, there’s a hefty fucking fee.” —Team America: World Police
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So what have you got in 2004, when Parker and Stone made the bold/crazy decision to make a feature film populated almost entirely by marionettes? You’ve got an America that had squandered vast reserves of global sympathy after 9/11, tackled terrorism with chest-thumping unilateralism, and allowed the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay to vulgarize history with a little movie called Pearl Harbor. You’ve also got crusading celebrity peaceniks, networks of evildoers seeking weapons of mass destruction, and a ronery North Korean dictator craving attention from other nations like a petulant 10-year-old. Throw all those ingredients in the pot, and you get the lumpy stew that is Team America: World Police, a catch-as-catch-can satire in the Parker/Stone tradition—meaning it’s cutting, politically incorrect, juvenile in ways both sublime and stupid, and sometimes misguided and genuinely risible. One major plus: The songs are great enough to hold the whole shambling operation together.
The first thing that stands out about Team America is the look of the film, pilfered from the “Supermarionation” of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s mid-’60s British TV show Thunderbirds. What’s particularly striking—and what tends to go unrecognized due to the natural awkwardness of puppetry with visible strings—is how beautiful the film looks, particularly in light of the deliberate shoddiness of Parker/Stone collaborations past. The photographer, Bill Pope, was just coming off the Matrix trilogy, and through his lens, the lovingly detailed environments come off like the greatest toy playsets a child could imagine. Sets like Paris, with its lush diorama of the city in miniature, or Kim Jong Il’s palace, with its ornate monuments to the diabolical narcissist himself, are gorgeous to behold, even though Parker and Stone seem intent on blowing up every last one of them. The marionettes also allow them to do for live-action what they get away with more easily in animation: demonstrate a deeply cynical, grossly oversimplified worldview by reducing characters to the most basic stereotypes. When you’re dealing with flesh-and-blood actors, people tend to call you on stuff like that.
Say this for Team America, though: The first 30 minutes or so are virtually non-stop brilliance, connecting the country’s “America, Fuck Yeah!” heavy-handedness to the garish spectacle of a Bruckheimer production. The late director Robert Altman got in some trouble after 9/11 for blaming Hollywood’s violent exports in part for inspiring such an attack, but while that claim seems tenuous, there’s a disturbing association between the destruction we present as entertainment and the destruction we reap and sow around the world. In the early going, Team America plays out like the self-conscious movie version of the War On Terror: Whenever the conspicuous Osama bin Laden look-alikes are onscreen, we hear the mournful Middle Eastern music cues of every terrorist-themed action movie of the past decade; before an all-American hero strikes down an enemy fighter, she’s ready with a canned one-liner (“Hey, terrorist: Terrorize this!”); and no famous monument or landmark is safe from demolition.
Parker and Stone make hay out of what Robert McNamara, in The Fog Of War, talked about as the perils of a disproportional response. Instead of doing scalpel-worthy work by disrupting terrorist networks, the shock-and-awe of the American military comes down like a club. In the opening sequence in Paris, the elite unit known as Team America takes down a handful of terrorists (“You in the robe, put down the weapon of mass destruction!”), but their errant missiles also lay waste to the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre. Then later, when they copter into a crowded bazaar in Egypt—where the pyramids and the Sphinx will also see damage—they land square on top of a merchant’s stand. “Fear not, Muslim friends,” they say. “We’re here to find terrorists.” And probably make a few as well.
Between the freewheeling digs at American solipsism (title card: “Paris, France; 3635 miles east of America”), the base language about why we’re at war (“They’re called terrorists, Gary, and they hate everything about you”), and inspired potshots at the musical Rent, Team America gets around to telling something resembling a story—cobbled together, of course, from bits and pieces of Bruckheimer movies past, especially Top Gun and Armageddon. The naïve hero is blue-eyed Gary, recruited from Broadway for the acting skills Team America needs to infiltrate a terrorist network. Even after meeting a crack unit of patriots—like former Nebraska all-star quarterback Joe, or Chris, “the best martial artist Detroit has to offer”—Gary is reluctant to answer the call to service.
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