Catfish at the Cinema - Team America

I keep forgetting that high expectations are not things to be carried into a movie theater. Without them, I'm sure I'd have loved the new Parker/Stone flick. But the buildup, damn the buildup.
I was expecting biting political and social satire, minute-by-minute chuckles from various puppet sight-gags and even a couple moments of transcendence.
What I got was one hell of a premise, an absolute feat of creativity, but precious little else.
The sets and marionettes were spectacular and the simple fact they made the damn movie at all is incredible.
The film definitely had its moments (puppet sex and several clever turns of dialogue) but all in all couldn’t find much humor, or anything at all, beyond the crutch of the premise.
Attempting a send-up of bad movies by nature carries with it that certain danger of making an explicitly bad movie in the process. While Team America didn’t go quite to those depths, the Bruckheimer parody elements just weren’t any good. It’s not enough to say “Hey, check out how bad this is,” by doing nothing more than giving a bad scene as proof.
Call it the Saturday Night Live syndrome. Sure it’s funny for about a second when somebody’s doing a send up of George Bush or American Idol, but past the novelty the sketches just suck. There’s just nothing there.
I’m not calling Team America a bad film, it’s just too obvious.
It’s like Parker/Stone hoped the premise - a ridiculous puppet action movie with lots of bad words - could sustain the whole movie. It simply can’t.