Team America: Satire without Comedy

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I went into Team America: World Police afraid that I was about to sit through a bunch of stoopid adolescent "shock" gags of the sort that South Park is infamous for. By the time it was over, I was wishing for more of them, because there was so little else there.

The movie consists of maybe half a dozen funny ideas, each with the potential for some laughs. But that's not enough to fill a feature film, so there's a lot of padding in which nothing interesting happens. The characters and plot plod through the clichés they're trying to satirise (in effect, making this just another bad action flick, but done with marionettes), boring me to the point that when the funny bits came along, all they got was a chuckle.

Then there's more predictable stuff happening, then the same joke comes along again, and this time it doesn't even get the chuckle. By the time the martial arts scene in which the puppets freeze in mid-air (suspended by their strings) and spin around, you've been waiting so long for it, it's not even funny. Doing the movie classic-Thunderbirds style, with marionettes is a fun idea. But it's not enough to turn all the dull, clichéd scenes into satire. They're just dull, clichéd scenes featuring wooden actors.

I was also prepared for the possibility of being offended... not by the "adult" material, but from the political jokes, which were promised to be scathing and aimed at figures across the political spectrum. I must have missed most of them. OK, so there's the worse-than-the-disease Rambo-mentality American military intervention on the one side (pretty obvious stuff), and the pawns-of-terrorists liberal celebrities on the other (stretched so far that it fails to be funny, because it bears no resemblance to anything we've seen). Yes, Kim Jong Il features prominently in it, but to be satire, you need to take actual characteristics and exaggerate them, not just take a standard megalomaniacle villain, and put a real person's name on it. The trailer promises to make George W. Bush and John Kerry very mad, but aside from W. pretending to be offended by the sex scene, I can't see why they would be; neither of them is even mentioned, let alone satirised.

The fact that so many prominent public figures were parodied doesn't make it satire, either. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that this was just a chance for the producers to titter as they ridiculed (and eventually killed) lots of famous people. Likewise, there's a song (one of the writers longs to write Broadway musicals) that exists only to whine about how the writer didn't like the movie Pearl Harbor. A movie that relentlessly ridicules popular entertainers for making political statements comes across as particularly lame coming from... a couple of popular entertainers.

The movie isn't without it's good points. There are genuinely funny bits sprinkled throughout it, and even the frat-boy-level humor of the puppet sex scene or the theme song with all the "fuck yeahs" in it were amusing. But if the movie has no serious point to make, and all you've got in the humor department are those half-dozen ideas, then it would have been better off as a non-stop half-hour laff riot instead of two hours of snores punctuated by snickers.