Team America: World Police in 4K review — It’s 9/11 times 2,356!

Are you easily offended? Then boy do I have the movie for you! Way back in 2004, the team behind South Park said to themselves “Can we make a movie that makes fun of the way America tries to operate as police for the entire world?” and the answer was apparently “Yes, but with puppets”. Nope, not a typo – this entire movie is performed with marionettes and miniatures. Either you are down with how absurd that entire concept is, or you aren’t the audience for Team America: World Police. Let’s dig into my also-going-to-offend review!

Inspired by the Gerry Anderson Supermarionation shows like Supercar, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, and many more that aired on the BBC from 1960 to 1969, the absurd storyline of this absolutely insane movie is that the world needs an actor to infiltrate a terrorist organization to help them root out their leader and take them down once and for all. When the terrorists retaliate, Gary feels responsible for the counter attack, and now the team has to try to get him back to stop the real threat behind it all – Kim Jong Il! Can this group of high-tech soldiers, dubbed “Team America” (hey, that’s the name of the thing!), come together to uncover the plot and save the world? Of course they can, what kind of stupid movie do you think this is?

Ok, well, this is a stupid movie, you’re right. It’s not gonna get repeat viewings like Baseketball does, and some of the jokes are very much a product of the early 2000s (e.g. Kim Jong Il is dead, the movie Pearl Harbor is long forgotten, though you could just as easily replace them with the Transformers movies), it’s still funny for an occasional watch. Unintentionally, some of the impersonations get funnier as their real-world counterparts do incredibly dumb things.

Now that the movie is in 4K, I’ve noticed more absurdities. For example, the streets of Paris are apparently paved with little tiny croissants. There’s a 7-11, AMC, and Hooters right in front of the Hollywood sign. The North Korean buildings are made from upside down Chinese food takeout boxes. The “trees’ ‘ in Panama are marijuana. The leaves on the palm trees in Hollywood during the F.A.G. meeting are made out of dollar bills. These are important details, I suppose, I dunno.

The other thing about moving to 4K is that the image is a whole lot more clear. Can you see the strings? If anything, they’re more clear – who cares. The film runs at 2160p native resolution, with a H.265 Dolby Vision and HDR10 encode – likely an upgrade over the Shout Factory upgrade for the Blu-Ray release in 2015. Watching a puppet vomit in 4K is something I apparently needed to see in awful color-corrected HDR, and…well, it’s here. It’s also audio mastered in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound (pulled straight over from the Blu-Ray release) to ensure you can hear said vomiting, and all of the awful impersonated actor voices clearly. The Team America song has never looked or sounded so good.

Given that this is the Unrated version, there are a number of goodies you may not have seen if you’ve only viewed the rated R version. A handful of them are included in the deleted scenes on the disc, but anything that isn’t there is laced directly into the film, such as the line “Surprise, cockfags!” when the team lowers a ramp to kill the terrorists by launching them into a nearby pyramid. Afterwards there are a few interviews with Timb Robbins, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, and others as members of the group F.A.G.(the Film Actor’s Guild, of course) that were also cut. A whole scene around Winnie the Pooh (“That c***sucking bear killed Jack Kennedy!”) is also present and accounted for. Yes, everything in this entire film is going to age badly. All told there are about a dozen major scene changes for the Unrated one, so you can expect a bunch you’ve not seen if you’ve only seen the theatrical or R version. (87 minutes and 32 seconds for the R-rated version, 91 minutes and 48 minutes for the Unrated one)

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