 Movie critics in their reviews of Team America: World Police are attempting to discern the political biases of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Although the film was denounced by Bush administration figures long before its release, New York Times critic A.O. Scott sides with those who espy a "pronounced conservative streak amid the anarchy," noting that while the film skewers numerous liberal figures in the media, including Sean Penn and Michael Moore, "right-wing media figures escape derision altogether." Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail makes a similar point: "Hollywood liberals who criticize their government's foreign policy are gleefully decapitated, dismembered and demolished. Right-wing apologists, never mind George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, are unscathed." But bias may be in the mind of the beholder, Washington Post critic Hank Stuever suggests: "What I took as a lampoon of Bushworld seemed to be received, in the seats around me, as a triumph of Bushworld." Actually, writes Robert K. Elder in the Chicago Tribune, "You never quite know whose [political] team they're on, and that's why Parker and Stone's wily brand of kamikaze satire works." And Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News calls the movie, "hilarious, shocking and bound to offend nearly everyone." But Roger Ebert is clearly unamused by what he calls the film's "nihilism." In his Chicago Sun-Times review, Ebert comments: "At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides -- indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they're wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn't matter." |
