I saw Team America: World Police this weekend.

I thought it was pretty funny...not as funny as I'd hoped, but still pretty funny.

If anything, I thought it worked best as a satire of American foreign policy and international relations. The team are all beautiful, well-groomed heroes, who do go in and kill the bad guys, but blow the shit out of everything else. They hop back on their brightly-colored jets with a "No need to thank us!", and they're seemingly oblivious to the destruction they've caused. They're equally oblivious to other cultures and languages. I think this is a pretty standard stereotype of America and its foreign policy, and the film nails it.

It's also pretty damned funny at mocking action films in general...but those are pretty easy targets. The sex and scat were cheap gags, but they were still pretty easy laughs.

What I was disappointed in was the satire of the Hollywood types. Michael Moore is a suicide bomber? Wouldn't it have been funnier to actually make fun of his horrendous filmmaking? Parker and Stone do a good job of skewering Bruckheimer-style filmmaking...why couldn't they do a send-up of Moore's crap? And having the liberal actors take up guns at the end just didn't work.

If I'd written it? I think it might have been funnier to have Kim Jong Il invite the actors to North Korea, give them a tour, and show them horribly-disguised missiles as schools or water treatment plants. The actors would be too stupid to not notice that they're missiles, and Kim Jong Il could convince them to strap themselves to the weapons to protect them. Then at the end you could still have the red digital clock countdown. Someone on Team America could stop it at 0:01, and then with his dying gasp, Kim Jong Il could restart it, launching the missiles, which Team America would then have to chase down in their planes and blow up, with the actors still strapped onto them. They would light up the skies around the world like pretty Fourth of July fireworks, but then somebody would say, "It's snowing!", and the commander would explain that no, it's radioactive fallout, and they'd all be dead in a month. Then everybody could laugh together, and they could roll credits.

Now that would be satire.

Anyway...one final complaint I had were the facial expressions of the puppets. I heard they made this film for $32 million. But a lot of the gags were about how poorly the puppets walked or fought. So why put so much effort into their eyebrow movements? I thought it would have been even funnier if it were even more low-tech, and if the puppets didn't blink or smile or arch their eyebrows. It would have saved them a couple of bucks, too.