Team America: World Police

I felt dirty after seeing "Team America: World Police", the newest bit of comedy from the warped minds of Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Remember, these are the guys that bring you "South Park" every week. "Team America" is the raunchiest, most offensive and violent, yet bitingly satirical, movie of the year.

Apparently by using marionettes as your characters, yes stringed-puppets, you can get away with just about anything and still keep an R rating. Team America is a group of world police that go around killing terrorists, with no regard for the damage they cause as a result. While the movie skewers both Republicans and Democrats, liberals may possibly be most annoyed by the film's content. In fact, I would think Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen and Michael Moore have grounds to sue.

The heart of the story revolves around Team America's attempt to stop Kim Jong Il's plot to disburse weapons of mass destruction around the world. The result includes graphic violence involving exploding puppets, more vulgarity than found in "Bad Santa", and quite a bit of puppet sex. This is probably as close to puppet porn as you will ever come in a mainstream theater.

"Team America" will appeal to fans of Stone and Parker's work. But even for all of it's efforts at being a political satire and statement on world affairs, "Team America" plays out more as if two teenage boys had puppets and a video camera and wanted to see how much they could get away with. But again, isn't that what Stone and Parker do best? I give it a C+.

"Team America" is rated R with a running time of 98 minutes.