Team America: World Police (2004)
Directed by Trey Parker
When North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il orchestrates a global terrorist plot, it's up to the heavily armed, highly specialized Team America unit to stop his dastardly scheme. The group, which has recruited troubled Broadway actor Gary Johnston, not only has to face off against Jong-il, but they must also contend with the Film Actors Guild, a cadre of Hollywood liberals at odds with Team America's 'policing the world' tactics.
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What critics compared Team America: World Police to
Heck, it contains the first puppet sex scene since “Team America: World Police.”
And not that comic, jangly, gratuitous puppet sex from "Team America: World Police."
That is, not unless you want to expose them to some heavy, grown-up ideas, including a memorable and moving portrait of depression and isolation, as well as one of the more graphic scenes of puppet sex you're likely to have seen this side of "Team America: World Police."
In 2004, in what was no doubt a first, the Motion Picture Association of America awarded an R rating to the "South Park" team's infamous "Team America: World Police" for "graphic crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong language — all involving puppets."
The overall effect is something like “The Polar Express” meets “Team America: World Police.”
There's a sex scene here that is nothing like the puppet sex scene in "Team America: World Police," for the record.
For those too young to remember the output of Ralph Bakshi, the definitive sequence involving animated intercourse would inarguably be the puppet-sex segment in 2004's Team America: World Police.
The precedent for this raunchy animated tale is “Team America: World Police,” which, with its puppet imagery, looked like a children’s movie, but sure didn’t walk or talk like one.
Except that this is a super-duper-R-rated comedy with ripping, raw language, violence against food, and sexual content that makes the puppet liaisons in “Team America: World Police” look downright subtle.
If the movie weren’t quite so pleased with its own raunchiness and political incorrectness (most food items correspond with a cultural stereotype), it might have been less of an extended stunt and more of an ingenious satire along the lines of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut or Team America: World Police.
Unsurprisingly, such hearty notions aren’t sustainable by this doggedly thin lark, which only manages to generate genuine witty momentum during its climax—a sexual romp of wild inappropriateness to rival Team America: World Police’s notorious puppet-sex sequence, and apt to make even the merry orgy revelers of Caligula blush.
At its best, the movie offers in-your-face raunch in the spirit of the superior “Team America: World Police” and “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”
No one could accuse Parker and Stone's lyrics of predictability: "I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark in Pearl Harbor/I need you more than Ben Affleck needs acting lessons."
They nail the cliches and make you realize things like Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” really did suck.
But what of these liberal actors, like outspoken Kerry supporter Ben Affleck, who star in movies like Pearl Harbor?
Or better still there’s a background song that is in fact a scathing musical movie review of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, substituted for a song about relationships.
Then, to hammer home their point, they even include a brazenly nasty, utterly hilarious third-act song titled “Pearl Harbor Sucked” (sample lyric: “All I’m trying to say is Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you.”).
Some viewers may be reminded of the Trey Parker/Matt Stone 2004 puppet movie, Team America: World Police.
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While the level of satire of The Dictator recalls Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004) to the degree that no political viewpoint or belief is safe from being derided, The Dictator feels more strategic.
If Trey Parker and Matt Stone were interested in making a sequel to their brilliant spoof Team America: World Police, they could easily borrow the plot of Roland Emmerich’s preposterous new action extravaganza White House Down.
So, 6 Underground essentially has the plot of Team America: World Police, in which the functions of the United States military, the CIA, and all other projections of American power abroad are instead performed by this small team.
However, when Olympus Has Fallen truly swan dives into the farcical is when it starts – sincerely – using dialogue and characterisations that feel like they’re lifted from Team America: World Police.
It's basically two hours of "America, Fuck Yeah!" — the Team America: World Police anthem that has unofficially been the motto of everything from the 2012 Summer Olympics to the Iraq War.
A dumber, louder, live action version of Team America: World Police in which North Korean terrorists (led by martial artist Rick Yune) shoot up the White House and take President Aaron Eckhart hostage, Olympus Has Fallen may, from a distance, seem eerily prescient.
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He's back in Tropic Thunder , the most daringly un-PC, in-your-face film that Hollywood has produced since Team America: World Police and a solid third hit in the trifecta of R-rated comedies of late summer 2008, which started with the pretty good Step Brothers , moved on to the great Pineapple Express , and ends somewhere in between with Tropic Thunder .
The result combines elements of "There's Something About Mary ...," "The Player" and "Team America: World Police," and yet almost nothing in "Tropic Thunder" is predictable or cliched.
If the 2004 marionette action parody “ Team America: World Police ” were remade with actual human beings and not a trace of irony, it could not be more entertainingly stupid than “Infinite,” the new Mark Wahlberg sci-fi thriller.