Team America: World Police is the latest cinematic effort from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. While the creative duo is best known for their animated series (and its related 1999 feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), Team America forgoes more traditional animation styling for a retro-style marionettes in an homage to the mid-1960s classic television show Thunderbirds.

Parker and Stone are the creative force behind the bulk of the film – acting as writers, producers, and the majority of character voices. (Parker directs.) They have also written the songs which bind the narrative together, and all of which Trey Parker sings. The film was conceived as the perfect send-up of Jerry Bruckheimer-style action pictures -- with the use of marionettes intended to make the action sequences as ridiculous as possible -- and, in true Parker and Stone style, the humor is as crass and offensive as the MPAA would allow it to be. (The film was originally given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, due to a “graphic” sex scene featuring two marionettes, but the scene was trimmed four times in order to bring the film to the public with an R rating.)

Team America tells the story of “ace actor” Gary Johnston, who was at the top of every acting class he ever took, and who double majored in theater and “world languages”. When we first meet Gary, he’s starring in a hit Broadway show, and is soon courted by Team America’s leader, Spottswoode. Team America is a group of highly trained and specialized action heroes who maintain a “secret” base in Mount Rushmore, and get all of their information about world events from a supercomputer named I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. Spottswoode and Team America have just learned of a terrorist attack that’s planned, and that will be “9/11 times one hundred” (which we are then told is “91,100”). They enlist Gary’s acting abilities so that he can go in, “act like a terrorist,” and get the details of the terrorist plot. Little does Team America know that the terrorists they are after are merely pawns in a bigger plot (one that is, in fact, “9/11 times one thousand”) which is being masterminded by Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea.

Much of the outright message of Team America seems to state that America (as a nation) is so caught up in its role as a worldwide police force (or, indeed, that America sees itself as a force of heroism that needs to swoop in and, in the words of Team America’s theme song, “save the day”) that it fails to understand the position of other countries in the world, and ultimately destroys more than it saves. Other nations are depicted as being annoyed by Team America’s help, and rightly so: they swoop in and destroy the Eiffel Tower while “saving” Paris, they destroy the Great Pyramids of Egypt while chasing a carload of terrorists, their vehicles are covered in Stars & Stripes imagery and crash recklessly through the marketplace stalls of ordinary citizens, and they are arrogant and rash and wear flashy costumes. Still, Team America genuinely believes that its goal is to save the world from evil doers, and the characters are led to ask themselves to put their lives on the line in the interest of the greater good.

What’s more, no group is safe from the savage mockery that makes up the better portion of the film’s humor. Conservative positions as well as liberal positions take a thorough bashing. Various ethnic groups are depicted in blatantly offensive and stereotypical ways. (It’s also worth noting that while there are plenty of “marionettes of color,” so to speak, every single member of Team America itself is white.) There is sex, gore, and plenty of crass humor. Parker and Stone incorporate just as many jokes and critiques on pop culture (for example, the song that expresses that “ Pearl Harbor sucked just a little more than I miss you”) into the script as they do jokes at the expense of celebrities such as Tim Robbins as Susan Sarandon – celebrities, they feel, that shouldn’t be putting their naïve viewpoints out into society in the form of “informed” statements about such matters as foreign policy.

The underlying message, however, is one that is in the end surprisingly clear and patriotic. The world needs Team America, even if it doesn’t always like how Team America handles things. If Team America can stop world destruction, then it should do so, even at the risk of embarrassing itself or making other nations and groups angry. This surprisingly conservative message leaves little room for the kind of multi-culturalist pacifist notion that we should try to talk our problems out and solve them through diplomacy; the film even goes so far as to state that diplomacy is fine, but when it fails, force is sometimes necessary. All of this is accomplished through one of the most crude metaphors possible; one that probably wouldn’t make it into print in most of the nation’s newspaper. It is shocking, yes, but surprisingly genuine and effective, underneath all of the potty-mouthed, shock-value laden exterior.

The film would not have been possible without the superb art design and humorous puppeteering of the supporting production teams. The retro, Thunderbirds-inspired look of the film feels fresh and interesting in today’s film market, and the colors are bright and saturated. The facial features of the marionettes are astonishingly expressive, even if their bodies and movements are jerky and almost impossible to take seriously. This is played up for laughs, very effectively, on more than one occasion in the film, and there are plenty of close-ups and mid-shots that make effective use of the puppets’ expressive qualities. Even so, no attempt is made to make the marionettes anything more than simple puppets, a fact which, in the end, probably contributed to sparing the film from the financial blow of an NC-17 rating, in spite of the sex scene and an extreme amount of graphic cartoon-style violence.

The film is, in the end, a pleasure to watch – the novelty of being constantly shocked and surprised, a novelty that Parker and Stone used to great effect in the South Park feature, is refreshing in a film market that’s trending back toward more conservative viewpoints and stylistic choices. The look of the film is fresh and entertaining, and the writing is somehow smart and inane at the same time. The comedic voice acting of Parker, Stone, and others continues to inspire laughs, and the song-writing that earned them an Oscar nomination in 2000 is almost as whip-smart and funny here. (The “That’s Called a Montage” number being one of the funniest and most spot-on spoofs of action-film tropes.)

Team America: World Police might not seem, on the surface, to be the most sophisticated of this year’s political films, but lurking underneath that crass, gross-out humor exterior is a surprisingly smart film, with real points to contribute to the national discussion about who we are as Americans, and what our place is on the world stage.