Early production reports suggested that Team America: World Police was racing through its shoot to make a release date prior to the November elections. Memories of the South Park movie and its portrayal of Saddam Hussein and the American military jumped immediately to mind, and tantalizing notions of a masterpiece of satire, a rival to Dr. Strangelove, began to formulate. At least in my mind.

So now, about a week or two after principal photography wrapped and a few weeks before the elections, Team America: World Police hits theaters and the verdict is: it is a masterpiece, of some dubious form or another. It has no statement to make, no politics to push; you get the sense that Trey Parker and Matt Stone think everyone and everything (well, almost everything, but I'll get to that shortly) is just pretty damn silly and needs to be made fun of. Except that they don't poke, they bludgeon. The film has moments of satire, yes, and many more of scatological humor, gore, slapstick and, depending on your perspective, outright racism. It would all be pretty funny if it were animated, a la South Park; because it's all done with marionettes, it's mostly hysterical.

The film is basically what Parker and Stone have always claimed it is: a Jerry Bruckheimer movie with puppets. All the cliches are in place, and mostly played straight; when one of the members of Team America dies in an early skirmish, he does so in the arms of one of his teammates, who looks to the sky and screams "Noooooooooo!" while the camera cranes up dramatically. The laughs come because all these action heroes have strings attached to them and, aside from their radio-controlled faces, are woefully inarticulate. When two adversaries have a kung fu fight, you can tell the puppeteers are basically just swinging the two marionettes into each other and making their limbs flail; the soundtrack, with its intense score and heavy duty sound effects, is blissfully unaware of the action's shortcomings.

So yes, that's satirical, and it's razor sharp. But then you have things like the AIDS musical number ("the straights, the gays/the white, the spades/everyone has AIDS!") or the dramatically profuse vomiting scene or the...well, I can't bring myself to spoil the movie's most absurd and confounding scene, which occurs between Team America's leader, Spottiswoode (something tells me Parker and Stone were watching Tomorrow Never Dies and laughing at the director's name when they came up with that particular character), and his newest recruit, Gary. Safe to say, the humor's all over the map, i.e. there's something for everyone, except for those easily offended. Like Sean Penn, who sent a well intentioned but woefully misguided open critique to Stone and Parker just last week.

Speaking of Penn, the humor gets curiously cloudy in the treatment of Hollywood actors and other liberals: puppet effigies of Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Penn and others all have prominent roles in the film, and they're all portrayed as weak-minded bleeding heart liberals who will quickly side with anyone who appears to be picked on by the U.S. (including this film's villainous mastermind, North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Il). They're fair game, certainly, but the viciousness of the attack is rather clumsy (having Matt Damon being incapable of saying anything but his own name really isn't that funny) and also blatantly one-sided. I have no trouble with Michael Moore being portrayed as a bloated slob willing to kill for his causes, but whither the O'Reillys, the Coulters, the Schwarzeneggers? At the end of the film, there's a meeting of world delegates at which Dubya and his administration are curiously absent. The mercilessness of the film seems curiously weighted to one side, and while I can laugh at seeing pundits I happen to agree with be debased so brutally, I felt a bit cheated by the film's sensitivity to equally outspoken Republicans.

It's a problem that I can't ignore, but it's also one that is mostly assuaged by the wonderful emphasis on how Team America casually destroys other cultures in its attempt to bring an end to terrorism. "Oops, I missed!" says one team member as his missile sweeps past an escaping band of Jihadists and plows into the Great Pyramids. The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the Great Sphinx get similar treatment in action scenes of glorious excess. And although everything is taking place on miniature sets, those sets are so well designed that the destruction feels alarmingly catastrophic.

The craftsmanship all around is pretty extraordinary; although the puppets don't have the greatest motor skills, their animatronic faces are highly emotive. There are many dramatic scenes, such as when team member Chris tearfully recalls the reason he hates actors or when Gary and his new flame Lisa profess their love to each other, and the puppets (and the voice over cast, most of which consists of Trey Parker) are more than up to the task. And the fact that these puppets have dramatic scenes at all is one of the funniest things about the movie.

I could go on listing everything else that made me laugh, but all that would prove is that I did indeed laugh. Humor is very subjective, and I'm sure there will be plenty of people who watch the film with aghast expressions frozen on their faces. I hope those people appreciate, however, the beauty of a world in which a film like this can be financed and given a wide release. I mean, just think about it: it's a big action film starring marionettes -- and honestly, there's not really much else one needs to say about it.