Metacritic Film

Team America: World Police

Starring Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Elle Russ, Stanley G. Sawicki, Kristen Miller, Dian Bachar, Josiah D. Lee, Paul Louis, and David Michie

MPAA RATING: R

Paramount Pictures
Action  |  Adventure  |  Comedy
98 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters October 15, 2004

This action adventure from the creators of "South Park" features an all-marionette cast as Team America, an international police force dedicated to maintaining global stability. (Paramount)

WRITTEN BY
Pam Brady
Trey Parker
Matt Stone

DIRECTED BY
Trey Parker

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

64 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Film Threat Rory L. Aronsky
Laugh hard, laugh long, but just laugh at true greatness. Parker and Stone have done it again, multiplied millions of times.
100 Washington Post
Wickedly funny and devilishly subversive. It is satire at its most fearless.
100 New York Post
Who's going to love it? Anyone with a sense of humor: Team America: World Police is hands-down the funniest movie of the year.
90 Dallas Observer
Bottom line: It's hilarious, vicious, offensive, thoroughly profane and a joy to watch, just like you'd expect. Be sure to sit through the end credits for a bonus song from Kim Jong-il to Alec Baldwin.
88 Rolling Stone
A ruthlessly clever musical, a punchy political parody and the hottest look ever at naked puppets -- the first film, porn included, in which a woody is actually made of wood.
88 New York Daily News
It turns out that puppets can tell us more about who we are as a nation than the most meticulous documentary. In Team America: World Police, the potty-mouthed, crazily brilliant musical from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the result is hilarious, shocking and bound to offend nearly everyone.
80 Washington Post Hank Stuever
This is all terrifically nasty and shocking stuff.
80 The New York Times
Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged Team America with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.
80 Slate
I laughed all the way through Team America: Scene by scene, it's uproarious.
75 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The first hour of the movie struck me as being truly inspired, and I haven't laughed so hard all year.
75 USA Today
When Team America works, it falls squarely into the category of guilty pleasure.
75 Entertainment Weekly
I was amused more or less throughout by the ingeniously designed and executed stunt that is Team America.
70 Time
The real kick, however, is in the grandeur and detail of the production design, by Jim Dultz and David Rockwell.
70 The Onion (A.V. Club)
Years from now, Team America will better convey the political character of 2004 than a stack of Time magazines. Staying funny helps even more.
70 The Hollywood Reporter
There is no room for subtlety. Aiming a rude, foul-mouthed political satire everywhere -- left, right and center -- Trey Parker and Matt Stone blow up a good deal of the world, not to mention the egos of many Hollywood personalities
70 Variety Brian Lowry
Goes the extra mile to piss off everybody -- which includes gleefully destroying renowned Hollywood liberals, literally and figuratively.
67 Portland Oregonian
You're guaranteed never to have seen anything like it; objectively speaking, it's a wonder.
63 Premiere
Wisely unbiased-but also unfocused, uneducated, and underachieving-which makes for an occasionally hilarious, frequently anemic parody that misses its opportunity to permanently document a scathing critique of current events.
63 Boston Globe
Stuck between point-blank ridicule and the obligations of a weary plot. Surprisingly, more than an hour of watching marionettes fight, curse, and fornicate turns out to be as dull as watching Michael Dudikoff do the same thing in one of his unremarkable soldier movies.
63 The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Give it an A for concept -- a bizarre marionette version of a Jerry Bruckheimer-style action movie; B for its occasional moments of convulsively funny comedy; and D for the politics, for pandering to exactly the kind of reactionary sentiments it purports to satirize.
63 ReelViews
This movie is more of a curiosity than a fully formed motion picture.
63 Charlotte Observer
Bits can be extremely funny. I howled at the ranting, mustard-splotched, wiener-waving Michael Moore.
63 Miami Herald
Egregiously vulgar satire on terrorism, global politics and Hollywood action movies gets an immeasurable boost from its wonderfully designed, old-school string puppets.
63 Philadelphia Inquirer
The puppets are anatomically correct and politically incorrect. They provide 45 of the funniest minutes I've spent at the movies this year.
63 Chicago Tribune
Team America's strengths are in its musical numbers, especially Kim Jong Il's mournful "I'm So Ronery" (translation: "Lonely"), a heartfelt peek into the dictator's soul.
60 Wall Street Journal
I know this sounds like great fun, and some of it is, but there's nowhere near enough good stuff to fill the 114-minute running time.
60 Los Angeles Times
Yes, it's inventive, yes, it's out-there and audacious, but no, it's not always as funny as those good things would lead you to hope.
60 LA Weekly
Accomplished yet uneven feature.
60 Empire
It makes for a patchy comedy that's stronger as a genre-mocker than a political satire.
50 TV Guide
The result is undeniably offensive and occasionally very funny, but the gags fall flat as often as they hit their mark.
50 Chicago Reader
This is hysterically funny in parts, but most of the laughs are raunchy or scatological--always a sure bet when puppets are involved.
50 Christian Science Monitor
The net effect is a barrage of jokes that strain to be outrageous - just as the marionette gimmick strives to be different - but wind up canceling each other out.
50 Austin Chronicle
Juvenile yet compellingly smart humor.
50 Baltimore Sun
Proves that marionettes can be as foul-mouthed and profane as their cartoon counterparts, but not nearly as clever.
50 Village Voice
Team America is at once grandiose and tacky, elaborate and deflationary.
50 Salon.com
Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.
25 San Francisco Chronicle
Surprisingly, the results are embarrassing. As puppetry, Team America is stilted. As satire, it's gutless and lazy. And as comedy, it barely delivers laughs.
25 Chicago Sun-Times
Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.

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