First, it's funny to see puppets getting mutilated; you simply can't blow the real Janeane Garofalo's head off. But more than that, this movie is a vicious attack on both the right and the left's default views of the War on Terror. These visions are so ridiculously contrived, cultivated by political parties for their own purposes, that they're not remotely close to what's really happening in the world. To our isolated, comfortable, America-centric culture (each foreign city in Team America is referenced by how far away from America it is), they're just stories played out by distant actors. It just seems right that in a vicious satire on political ideologies, we should see the strings being pulled. Team America literalizes the political puppet show.

But the movie goes a step further — perhaps a step not even realized by Parker and Stone. By filtering these partisan worldviews of the War on Terror through a parody of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, they suggest that we've swallowed these ridiculous, movie-ish approaches to terrorism precisely because our collective consciousness has been shaped by Bruckheimer, whose productions include Crimson Tide, The Rock and Armageddon. Didn't the Bush administration pretty much tell us that the military would do just what Team America does in 15 of the most hilarious minutes of the past decade of movies: fly their star-spangled fighter jets from Mount Rushmore to the Middle East accompanied by a hard rock song ("Team America, fuck yeah!/ Off to save the motherfucking day, yeah!"), kill terrorists with red-and-white-striped missiles missiles and jet back to George Washington's mouth? That anyone ever thought it would really be as easy the propaganda suggested is, as much as anything else, a testament to how dumbass Bruckheimer action movies have warped our minds.

Perhaps it's not just that the American public has bought into the Team America strategy — the neocons actually believe it too. Actor-turned-President Ronald Reagan, after all, wanted to shoot missiles out of the sky from outer space with a system so ludicrous it earned the nickname "Star Wars." Isn't Team America, "the lighter, faster, more agile, yet also more lethal combat force," pretty much Donald Rumsfeld's vision of military transformation? In the '80s, Bruckheimer's Top Gun helped increase Navy recruitment by 500 percent, which the Reagan administration openly embraced. Since then, in a rare synergy with Hollywood, the action movie has embraced the ideology of the Right. In fact, with the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger to national prominence as a Republican leader, the action star has literally become the politcal right. Bruckheimer himself acknowledges the propagandistic mission of his films. Few of the neocons have actually experienced battle; it's as if they've taken their cues on conducting war from action blockbusters and turned that into national policy. Fuck yeah!

But what of these liberal actors, like outspoken Kerry supporter Ben Affleck, who star in movies like Pearl Harbor? Don't they get it, or have they somehow bought their own bullshit that their "art" is important too? This is for whom Parker and Stone save their most vicious attacks. They say they have nothing against the celebrities themselves (except for Sean Penn), but rather against the idea that these actors actually think they have something to contribute to the War on Terror. (As "Janeane Garofalo" says, "It's our job to read the newspaper, and then say what we read as if it's our own idea.") More than that, Parker and Stone wonder why we should care what these actors' ideas are — I mean, have you seen their movies? How dumb do people have to be to take their political cues from moviemakers so detached from reality that they use war as a backdrop to bland romance? (Team America's love theme is "Pearl Harbor Sucked, and I Miss You.") They turned "Iraq is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" into a faux-hippie peace protest. As "Sean Penn" says, "Before Team America arrived, Iraq was a land where children frolicked in rivers of chocolate." Because the liberal left made their case against the Iraq War as a peace movement rather than a tactical argument, they came off as shrill and hollow, nearly undermining the entire Democratic Party's ability to fight President Bush. When did acting become a weapon in the War on Terror, anyway? Parker and Stone ask just this when a Broadway musical actor is recruited by Team America because his "acting" is needed to fight the terrorists. (They turn the camera on adoring Broadway audiences applauding the musical "Lease" and its closing number "Everybody's Got AIDS!") All the while, because of their capitulation to "peace," Alec Baldwin and crew literally align themselves with Kim Jong-Il. Isn't this precisely why conservatives and leftist hawks hate them so much?

True to their "South Park" form, Parker and Stone reveal their real philosophy in a moral-of-the-story speech at the end. The most shocking thing about these moments, as "South Park" fans know, is how rational and nuanced their ideas are. Nothing too deep, mind you, but disconcertingly sane and shockingly traditional for a show so crude and vulgar. In Team America, though, the boys really cut loose with a speech about dicks, pussies and assholes that is, strangely, one of the most coherent, concise positions I've yet heard on the War on Terror. This is what elevates the work of Parker and Stone from spoof to true satire.

And like the best satire, Team America: World Police has offended critics. Many film critics, most notably David Edelstein and Roger Ebert, have chastised the movie's left-bashing as being juvenile. But the jokes about the right's kill-'em-to-save-'em logic? Hilarious. They love it when Team America accidentally blows up the Sphinx and then tells the Egyptians that it's OK because "we saved you from the terrorists." But when Tim Robbins rails against "Corporations being all corporate-y and stuff," that's not so funny. This leftist hyprocrisy is precisely what the film rails against, and it should come as no shock that critics, who seem eager to embrace this film as an elevated work of satire, flinch because their side is also attacked.

None of this meta-analysis would mean a damn thing if the puppet action weren't funny, which it is. To my untrained eye, these puppet stunts are pretty remarkable, even though no attempt is made to hide the puppets' limitations. Perhaps the weirdest aspect of the movie is that, after a while, the puppets start to feel like real action movie characters. They operate on the Gene Siskel Theory of Non-Human Characters: The audience identifies with non-humans through the eyes. (Siskel explained this during a heated argument with Ebert about why Free Willy sucked, which ended with Siskel saying Ebert identified with Willy because he's fat.) Parker puts the camera in just the right place — those action movie angles that allow for the gradual focus so the actor can telegraph an unsubtle emotion directly into the camera. Because the technique seems so familiar, the puppets almost become real — only marginally more artifical than Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor or Tom Cruise in Top Gun. It's not too much of a leap to watch the camera pan up the sexy blonde Team American's legs to her unnaturally pointy puppet breasts and think, "Wow, that's one hot puppet." Really, is she any less real-looking than Monica Potter or Kate Beckinsale?

Kim Jong-Il might seem an odd choice to represent the Axis of Evil, considering Parker and Stone's past with Saddam Hussein. But Kim himself is a avid movie buff, has even directed a few movies of his own and once kidnapped a South Korean director and forced him to shoot a socialist Godzilla. The Kim puppet looks like an Asian Chucky, with a little round gut, oversized glasses, a nihilistic worldview and a temper quick enough to feed UN weapons inspector Hans Blix to sharks. In other words, a typical Bruckheimer villain. Parker has said that he thought Kim would be honored by his portrayal because reports are that he thinks of himself more and more like a maniacal madman trying to "throw chaos to the world! Wha ha ha ha!" Kim even gets a musical number, "I'm So Ronery," that so perfectly captures the action-movie shorthand for "humanizing" that it deserves an Oscar nomination. In a movie about how movies have corrupted our perceptions, the perfect villain is the cinephile with rogue nuclear weapons.

It's very awkward to try to argue that a movie whose chief draw is a minute-long hardcore puppet sex scene might be the movie of the year. First and foremost, Team America: World Police's puppet show is creative: In its way, it's like nothing you've ever seen. It's more hilarious than your average spoof because it doesn't just mock clichés, it dredges up the underlying emotions and pulls no punches in the deconstruction ("Team America, fuck yeah!"). This madness has its own clear vision that goes beyond the knee-jerk left/right politics of pop culture — and even suggests a deeper, culturally rooted explanation for the deep division in America. And there's a minute-long puppet pea-soup puke scene. And the intelligence mastermind who coerces the actor-recruit into giving him a blow job so they can trust each other. In their crude chaos, Parker and Stone are onto something potent here. Politicians on both sides say that terrorists hate us for who we are. Team America: World Police responds that who we are is a culture whose ideas can be manipulated like a very jingoistic or very shrill marionette. The form meets function.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)