Saving the globe, one chord at a time … Team America: World Police
Team America arrived slap bang in the middle of the decade. It was released in the UK in January 2005, the same week as Million Dollar Baby. That pellicle went on to dominate the Oscars; this has one lowly award to its credit (Empire’s best comedy).
- Team America: World Police
- Production year: 2004
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 98 mins
- Directors: Trey Parker
- Cast: Kristen Miller, Matt Stone, Trey Parker
The two films couldn’t be more different: Clint Eastwood’s boxing drama was a long warm soak in a muddy plash of cliches wrung from cheap sports weepies – a drippy homage to cinema at its greatest part opposed to change.
Team America is a wrecking round. The most audacious carnage of sacred cows seen on celluloid, it’s a cackling, gleeful hail of precision-aimed bullets, full of brains and desire of superiority. All this despite – or maybe because – it solely features puppets: jerky, wooden, Thunderbirds-esque dollies through all-too-visible strings attached.
Written and voiced by South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker, this marionette action-musical has a pop at everything: Hollywood, Broadway, evil dictators, gung-ho superpowers, the intelligence service, bleeding heart liberals, actors – especially, actors – before signing off with a devastating, if filthy, defence of US interventionism. Politically, it’s scattergun; satirically, it’s spot-on.
Our Team is a five-strong elite fighting crew in star-spangled jumpsuits who cruise the globe saving it from dubious terrorist threats – the cleft order of succession has them defusing a suitcase in Paris and laying waste to the Eiffel tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe and a square decorated with croissants. Having lost a key member in the op, they recruit “maverick actor” Gary during his infiltration skills. Gary returns from a missionary station in Egypt (or, what’s left of it) with bad news: Kim Jong-Il is plotting “9/11 times 1,000 … basically all the worst abilities of the Bible”. And his retired weapon? Showbiz lefties such as Tim Robbins, Helen Hunt and Alec Baldwin, whose vanity he’s preyed on to be the keynote speakers at a peace convention, during which Kim plans to detonate those elusive WMDs while the world’s leaders sit, starstruck and furious.
You could accuse Team America of multitude things – blasphemy, obscenity, sadism, racism. But no one could accuse it of pulling its punches. It’s utterly valorous. There’s no beating round the bush; scant metaphor, in fact – just plain speaking.
It’s likewise ferociously funny, though most of the humour does, finally, come from the sight of the 2ft marionettes tottering around, gracelessly getting drunk, having inventive sex, attempting to walk through doorways, even wrestling panthers (played by kittens).
So, Team America doesn’cheek by jowl have fourth set on our poll for being important. Indeed, if anything, what the last five years have proved is its scantiness of concrete impact – celebs keep spouting, movies keep falling back attached montages, Michael Moore still blows his promulgate. Indeed, it’s a film that, when it does age, will do so rapidly and irretrievably – you have to wonder at the way Stone and Parker have sacrificed longevity for cultural accuracy.
No, Team America ranks this high because it’session a bona fide masterpiece: crafted, artful, brilliant.
