I started talking about Team America: World Police since the 10th of August and putting in high expectations for this movie. Being a huge South Park fan, I like Matt and Trey’s twisted humor and their sarcasm. A few years ago, I thought moving South Park to the cinema screen was a big mistake, but they managed to pull it off, as "South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut" was one of the funniest stuff I have ever watched. As far as I am concerned, Team America is the most anticipated movie of the year. I was looking for practically every piece of information there was about the movie, including all the interviews of Matt and Trey on Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and other talk shows. Finally, I managed to watch this movie about 4 days ago, and it proved one of my favorite theories right - "If you expect too much from a certain thing, it will surely go wrong." Team America was quite a huge disappointment, at least for me.
As usual, Matt and Trey were making fun of current global issues, this time the war with terrorists. The storyline was rather simple. Team America is a special unit, designed to fight the terrorists and their weapons of mass destruction. The main villain is the North Korean Dictator, Kim Jong Il, who wanted to take over the world because he was ronery (lonely in Engrish). Other scoundrels are from the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G. - you know what that means), which were formed by Matt and Trey’s list of idiotic celebrities. Team America wanted to save the world by using George Bush’s "Drop the bomb first, ask question later" method, whereas the F.A.G. was trying to solve the conflict by using peace talks and a more diplomatic approach.
Most people were surprised to find out that this movie favored the Republican’s political view. Some were disappointed, some were excited. Over all, most of the right wing supporters were relieved that a Hollywood production are on their side, especially after the controversial Fahrenheit 9/11. I guess Matt and Trey were just pissed off with the Hollywood actors who got involved with politics and voiced out their support to Democrats. The message of the movie was clear, “Actors need to shut the hell up and act better in their movies”.
The comedy part of the movie was normal, there were some funny parts, and I like most of the songs (especially “I am Ronery” and “Pearl Habour Sucks”). But it is just not Cartman’s type of funny that you will think about it over and over again and laugh like an idiot. Some of the jokes are just toilet humour, very much the same as Trey’s “Orgazmo” in 1997. However, the visual parts of this movie was superb. Just incase you didn’t know, this is a string-puppet show, just like the 80’s Thunderbird series. All the marionette stuff looks super real, even the facial expressions on the puppets. The entire movie was non-computer generated and all the explosion scenes were real. They even hired Bill Pope (Cinematographer for the Matrix series) to direct the action scenes. Anyhow, the first half of the movie was rather boring and there aren’t any classic quotes or funny lines.
It breaks my heart to say this, but Matt and Trey finally fucked up. Team America was way overrated and created too much hype before the actual release. Well I guess we should just put our hopes on the second half of South Park season 8.