Violence, vomit, and sex, oh my!

This is basically a gross movie with long boring stretches. I don't know whether the boring stretches weren't even meant to be funny, or if they were supposed to be funny in a non-gross way and just flopped. The grossness is on many levels, and how funny you find it will depend on your own taste, or lack thereof.

Of course I liked the mockery of foreigners -- all the ragheads jabbering "Mohammed jihad" over and over, Kim Jong Il singing "I'm so ronery," the Panamanian wailing "No me gusta" as he's washed away in the flood. But the movie mocks the Americans, too -- not just the fatuous members of F.A.G., but the "heroes" themselves.

There isn't enough gore-spatter for my taste, especially when you consider the need to compensate for the fact that they're just a bunch of puppets. Hans Blix being fed to the sharks is one of the funniest scenes in the whole film, though.

The puke scene is the funniest. That they got exactly right. The puke just kept spewing and spewing and spewing, and I kept laughing and laughing until my sides hurt, and it stopped just when I was finally exhausted.

The strong language is a bit overdone. "America, fuck yeah!" is a funny line to start off a song with; but the rest of it keeps going on and on like that. The sexual and scatological content is way overdone. A sex scene with puppets, for instance, sounds funnier than it actually is, and is best gotten over with quickly.

So, if you're looking for a truly patriotic movie, don't be fooled: this ain't it. But if you like seeing America's enemies getting shot, blown up, incinerated, etc., even if only in effigy, you'll have a pretty good time. If you find puke scenes funny, this has the best since Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and maybe even tops it. If you like lots and lots of obscenity, it's a treasure-trove.

© 2004 by Karl Jahn

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