Review by © Jane Freebury
A little while back, before terrorism became an everyday word, the South Park team launched a rough and rude feature animation from their TV series, which they gleefully subtitled Bigger, Longer and Uncut. In that movie there was a guest appearance from Saddam Hussein and the United States went to war against Canada because it exported cultural trash and depraved the youth of America. Thinking back to that nonsense scenario now it doesn’t seem quite so silly. Is reality just doing catch up?
In the times we live in, the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have plenty to get stuck into now and they let it rip with cute little puppets who mow each other down with submachine guns and wreak destruction on the world’s great cultural landmarks. Not a pretty picture, and I can ruefully imagine the extraterrestrials on other planets are queueing up right now for ringside seats for the greatest show here on earth.
From their HQ inside Mount Rushmore, the crack commandos of the team fly out from the US to the world’s hot spots to root out the troublemakers. When a gang of terrorists are causing mayhem in Paris they step in to help and manage to blow up the Louvre and topple the Eiffel Tower in the process. After all, as they say in their motto, their job is to ‘protect, serve and care’ and their theme song is ‘America, F**k Yeah’.
Now it’s North Korea’s Kim Jong-il who is the new arch villain, selling off WMDs to terrorists around the globe, so he can create equality – where everyone lives in a third-world country. This new jowly-cheeked villain is really very funny.
I liked the puppets and sets too – a step up from 2D South Park – and the songs too, most of which are accomplished and original in their way, but it’s the usual cynical cop-out from the South Park team.
Everything and everyone is fair game, from the US hawks to the liberal Hollywood establishment and the movie seems to reserve an especially nasty end for the puppet ‘actors’ – with names like Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Samuel Jackson – who visit Jong-il and offer appeasement. For a movie that wants to have it both ways, this was rather surprising.
In a capsule: A world of puppets where everyone gets a serve – for South Park fans only.
3 stars