Team America: World Police (R, 2004)

South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone have created a fabulously intricate puppet world here, with replicas of iconic monuments from Mount Rushmore and the Sphinx to the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal. And the duo takes such pleasure in being naughty that it makes their work more silly than smutty. In their best work, the outrageousness is in aid of a statement, a sharp attack, so that the four-letter words and cheerful bad taste transcend their schoolyard shock value to work as satire. But when there's no special point of view and they just decide to bash everyone on all sides, it runs out of steam quickly.

This latest venture would have made a hilarious 15-minute short, but at feature length it gets repetitive and tiresome. When the movie is good, it's very funny. But Stone and Parker go after everyone here -- people who want to fight terrorists, people who don't want to fight terrorists, people who are terrorists, and people who just have really, really inflated senses of their importance in the world. And so the satire is too scattershot to sustain the film.