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PUPPETS OF WAR
Joe, Gary, Chris, Lisa and Sarah swing into action.
team america: world police
The South Park boys are back with a rude, crude puppet
epic called Team America: World Police. Fletcher Reid
takes a trip into the new, string-controlled world of
Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
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Six years ago, when they were finishing off their first big movie, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, Matt Stone turned to Trey Parker - or maybe it was the other way round - and said words to the effect of, “That’s it. Enough of Hollywood. We’re out of here.”
They’d done a couple of low-budget movies (including Orgazmo, featured in Preview in 1997, before they were really famous), and now they’d done a studio picture - albeit a disrespectful, potty-mouthed one that blamed Canada for most things.
Maybe the South Park movie’s worldwide success (although I never did check how it did in Canada) made Stone and Parker think again. Or maybe they just changed their minds. Whatever: they’re back. But there’s one big difference. This time, it isn’t stick-cartoon kids with funny-shaped heads spouting obscenities, blood and various other bodily fluids; it’s three-quarter scale puppets spouting obscenities, blood and bodily fluids. Especially the latter, in a sequence which robs The Exorcist of its record for the longest projectile-vomiting scene in the history of the cinema.
It will come as no surprise to their millions of fans that Stone and Parker, who came out of Colorado some time in the mid-nineties and gave the world South Park, may have raised the budget, but they haven’t really raised the taste barrier in their new film, Team America: World Police.
Still, they want everyone to know that they remain as even-handed as ever: they take the piss out of all nations, races and creeds with equal glee. “We don’t take any sides or try to make any big statements,” insists Stone. “It’s just like what we do on South Park – we just make fun of everything.”
Team America: World Police is about exactly what it says it is. “A lot of us have heard the phrase, ‘Who do you think you are, the world police?’” explains Stone. “Well, we decided to make that a totally real thing.”
Or as real as you can with puppets.
The eponymous Team America are a group of US anti-terrorist special agents so gung-ho they would shock John Wayne. Operating from a high-tec, James Bond-style base (and cocktail bar) deep inside Mount Rushmore - whose presidential faces open their mouths, drop their jaws or flip the tops of their heads to let the Team’s rocket-propelled ships come in and out - they rapidly respond to trouble spots around the world, terminating with extreme prejudice any bearded fundamentalist terrorist (or anyone who looks like a bearded fundamentalist terrorist). The notion of collateral damage most definitely doesn’t apply: responding to an imminent attack in Paris, the Team get their men - while streets full of bystanders, babies in prams, the Eiffel Tower and all three wings of the Louvre get it, too. A little later, the Pyramids crumble. But what the hell, the world is safe for democracy.
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