I went to see the much ballyhooed, and (IMO) over-rated “Team America” flick this weekend. Granted, there were some very funny bits, but the puppet shtick was only funny for about half an hour. The rest of the movie seemed like a run-down of 80s action movie cliches, many of which have been parodied to death already.
In the Paris, France scene, one of the team members is killed, and his team-mates look up towards an overhead camera and scream “NOOOOOOO!!!” which is of course a ridiculous action movie staple, but it’s already been parodied - most memorably in “the Simpsons” (in a clip for a “McBain” movie). Doing this gag yet again is a joke in itself - it’s been done already. Why do it again?
But my BIG gripe is the late-in-the-flick “training montage” scene. Not only is this a direct lift, but it’s a direct lift from a SOUTH PARK cartoon! (Produced by the same two guys who made this movie!) This smacks of laziness, IMO: Not merely satirizing the same source material as other series already have, but repeating their own material! They couldn’t come up with enough fresh material, so they padded out their already short (90 minutes, short for this day & age) film with a gag they’d already done. For that, I give this otherwise mildly amusing flick a big thumbs down!
So what?
I laughed and laughed and laughed. Who cares if I’ve seen this things before, and laughed at them then, too? And you just mentioned a DAMN small percentage of the total jokes in the movie.
And I think the montage bit was even funnier in its second incarnation. Come on, it’s a joke about a lazy narrative technique.
As for action cliches, they were used to great effect. Things get parodied because they’re cliches – you can’t say “Aw, someone already made fun of that bit. Let’s not poke any more fun at it, and just let it remain in every other unimaginative action movie without comment.” (Why do I see a marionette Kim Jong Il complaining that “The Simpsons Did It”?)
Complaining that action cliches have been parodied before might make sense if they had set out to make a simple parody of the action genre, instead of making a more complex film that lampoons the current political situation with action hero cliches in the psychedelic style of state-of-the-art 1960s UK marionette entertainment.
I agree with the OP, but he forgot the repeated fake Arabic joke from South Park (the terrorists had conversations that sounded like “Mohommed Jihad jihad Mohommed”). This was a worse steal because the joke didn’t even make sense in this context. When they did it in South Park, it was because last part of the episode (Osama Bin Laden has a Tiny Penis) was a parody of WWII shorts where they ridiculed the foriegn enemies (mainly Japanese) with stereotypes and obviously fake language. They, of course, weren’t parodying those shorts in Team America (because it wasn’t animated), so the joke fell flat.
It was pretty funny, but i didn’t think it lived up to the hype. I was expecting it to be funny in the same way South Park is funny, but it didn’t feel quite the same. I think the comedy fell a little flat without the foul-mouthed child’un.
Don’t get me wrong, i enjoyed it, but i think it could have been funnier yet. I think they should have taken even more advantage of the puppets-in-odd-scenarios schtick, like they did with the panthers (by far one of the funniest parts of the movie).
My boyfriend laughed through the whole thing, I didn’t laugh as much but I was laughing until I had tears in my eyes over the “panthers”. I have a panther like that living in my home.