AS the Bush administration goes to war on terrorism, so South Park anarchists Trey Parker and Matt Stone go to foul-mouthed war on political correctness, Gerry Anderson and Michael Moore in Team America: World Police, a puppet action comedy for sarcastic adults only.

Team America is an international special-operations police force that discharges its gung-ho version of global stability from headquarters inside Mount Rushmore. The team emerges in state-of-the-art machinery from the stone heads of America's presidents to flatten Paris, Panama, wherever, in pursuit of removing weapons of mass destruction from terrorist cells. Not so much Thunderbirds, as Blunderbirds.

After another botched operation, the team of all-American quarterback Joe, clairvoyant Sarah, psychology expert Lisa and martial arts head-case Chris needs a new addition to help them take on Kim Jong II, the tyrannical, lisping leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Team commander Spottiswood requires a master of disguise to infiltrate the terrorist network, and that reluctant man is young Broadway heart-throb Gary Johnston, star of AIDS musical Lease (Parker and Stone's acerbic spoof on Rent). Only this actor turned covert operative can save the free world, and his cause is not helped by the Hollywood liberals of FAG (the Film Actors Guild) - puppets of Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins et al - jumping into bed with Kim Jong II.

Parker and Stone labour the FAG joke and a vomit gag and Spottiswood's fixation with sodomy, but the spoofing of Thunderbirds is spot on, and the sniggering digs at Michael Moore, jingoistic Jerry Bruckheimer action movies and the crass incompetence of director Michael Bay and actor Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor have the cruelty of Jacobean revenge dramas.

The technical skill of the film-making should not be overlooked: on the one hand it gleefully lampoons the limitations of Gerry Anderson's era; on the other, it pulls off the destruction of the Panama Canal with dazzling aplomb.

Meanwhile, no action movie clich is left un-stoned, even down to the puppet porn scene (which apparently has been trimmed but still has more action than Showgirls).

Team America is an exercise in intolerance, subversive in its attitudes to social-conscience theatre, junk blockbuster movies and the Hollywood elite and yet dismissive of all liberalism. Gays take a bashing, George Bush escapes without a single mention, and apparently the outwardly ironic rock anthem America: F*** Yeah has gone down great guns with the boys in Iraq.

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Updated: 16:15 Thursday, January 13, 2005