Team spirit.

SOMETHING strange happened after the first screenings of Team America: World Police: The Left squealed and squealed--not with delight, but in indignation, disbelief, and fury. They were being skewered, in this movie, and they weren't used to it. They are never skewered in the movies. They own the movies! How could this happen?

I thought of Fox News: Every other news network on the planet might be left-leaning, but should there be one that strays from the herd, a lot of people go nuts. This must be the way it is with monopolists: If you own almost everything on the block, the one building you don't own stands as a huge offense.

So, who's responsible for Team America? Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the duo from South Park. What is South Park? The animated, incredibly foul, anarcho-libertarian sitcom on Comedy Central. The show is beloved--or at least appreciated--by some conservatives, because it sends up the PC Left wildly. (Flaky, self-righteous environmentalists come in for special mockery.) And you will recall that, in 1999, Parker and Stone made a South Park movie, which parodied the cultural Right, among other things.

They met at the University of Colorado in Boulder, these two. They took the same film class, and as Parker told an interviewer in 1998, "We were the only ones who didn't want to make black-and-white films about lesbians." That set them apart as "conservatives" right there.

Soon they were in Hollywood, and their sitcom had been sold. Comedy Central placed no restrictions on them. Or rather, almost no restrictions: They couldn't make fun of the Nation of Islam. Why? As Parker put it to another interviewer, "We think it was out of fear that we'd be killed, and then [the network] wouldn't have a show." This is hardly irrelevant to the present situation.

Last summer, word leaked that the boys were preparing a movie that would parody the War on Terror. One White House official complained--to the Internet's Matt Drudge--that the war was no laughing matter. So now the Bushies were Censors of Art. Some of us duly debated the matter on CNN. When Team America came out, however, it wasn't the White House who was complaining. Certain lefties kept a kind of scorecard: How many times did Parker and Stone skewer the Terror Warriors, how many times did they skewer the Hollywood Left (the Left that gets skewered in this flick)?

Sean Penn is one of the skewerees, and, as soon as the movie was glimpsed, he sent a fiery note to the boys, closing, "All best, and a sincere f*** you." The boys remarked that the likes of Penn weren't accustomed to being mocked. That was an understatement: They are used to being honored as sages and saints (saints of the political kind).

Parker and Stone are amazingly fearless, willing never to eat lunch in their town again. George Clooney is a friend of theirs--or at least a friendly acquaintance--but they place him among their dupes and dolts, too. Parker told In Focus, "We've hung out with George. But the thing is, he was on that list, man--he was on that MoveOn.org. So we weren't gonna be hypocritical and be like, 'Well, let's not pick on George. He's our friend.' We're like, 'Nope: F*** you, George.'"

The duo likes to make enemies everywhere, being equal-opportunity insulters. But to insult the Left ... is to do something shocking, and decisive. As Parker observed, "Basically, if you think Michael Moore's full of [something], then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we're both pretty middle-ground guys." The film critic of the New York Times, A. O. Scott, noted that Parker and Stone have "always been hard to place ideologically"--but "a number of commentators have discerned a pronounced conservative streak" in their work, "a hypothesis that 'Team America' to some extent confirms."

The movie--which is done with marionettes, incidentally--concerns the efforts of Team America (otherwise known as "the administration") to defeat the bad guys. Chief among these bad guys are Islamist terrorists and Kim Jong Il. The story opens in Paris, where, in the process of killing some terrorists, the Team accidentally blows up the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and much else. Here we see one of the movie's themes: America may be reckless, clumsy, heedless, but it means well, unlike its opponents.

Later, in Egypt, Team America blows up some large ancient statues (in addition to the Pyramids). I couldn't help thinking that the Taliban blew up such statues, deliberately. They thought that their religion demanded it.

Team members are rah-rah patriotic, and the Manhattanites with whom I saw the movie enjoyed laughing at them. One warrior (the protagonist, and our hero) visits the Lincoln Memorial, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and Arlington Cemetery, where he prays--they laugh. Every time a character gushes mock-Rumsfeldian rhetoric, they laugh.

But they stop laughing when the tables are turned--and some of them even walk out! Penn, Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen, Matt Damon, et al. are members of the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G. They spout nonsense (very true-to-life) about corporations, warmongering, and hybrid cars. When Team America is held hostage by Kim Jong Il, Penn and Sheen serve, for a while, as their guards. We're meant to think--I think we're meant to think--of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. Is this fair? No, it is savagely satirical--and probably no less fair than Michael Moore's putatively factual Fahrenheit 9/11.

Speaking of Moore, he is in Team America--definitely not on Team America--as a suicide bomber. He blows up Mt. Rushmore, site of Team America headquarters.

That is kind of funny. What isn't funny at all is when terrorists blow up the Panama Canal. The carnage is horrible. We see bodies in the fashion of 9/11. Then Alec Baldwin is depicted lecturing Team America, saying they're to blame: "The blood of the victims is on your hands." May I share an e-mail I received recently? This was right after terrorists in Iraq killed some 30 children: "The blood of these innocents is on the hands of those slimeballs, Bush and Cheney, and, Mr. Nordlinger, on your hands for supporting them. I hope their ripped-apart, bloody bodies float on your mind each night when you go to bed, because they should if there's any justice." Parker and Stone don't conjure a mentality out of the air.

The lead villain of the piece is Kim, the Dear Leader, who is a hoot, if an evil one. He often says, "Herro!" (That would be "Hello!" Did I mention that these guys are mind-bogglingly politically incorrect?) Kim feeds a gullible Hans Blix--"Hans Brix"--to the sharks. This is shortly after Blix asks to inspect Kim's palace, "or else." "Or else what?" asks the dictator. Or else--and this may be the most effective bit of satire in the whole movie--"we [the U.N.] will be very, very angry, and we will write a letter telling you how angry we are."

When he has them in his clutches, Kim sneers at Team America, "You're the last of the flag-waving Americans." But there's life in that breed yet: They trip up Kim, the terrorists, and the apologists who give them aid and comfort. (There's a loaded phrase.)

I have written a political review--not really a review at all. The movie is not a clear success, being too crude, for one thing. (By "crude," I don't mean dirty, which it is, to a revolting extent. I mean not clever enough.) In truth, the movie, slam-bang and brief as it is, is a little dull. It is partly a spoof of the action genre, stocked with entertainment-world references and allusions. And it has some amusing music.

Our main point here, however, is that Team America has the Left in a snit, which is a marvelous thing. It also puts the warriors on the side of cool, sort of--another marvelous thing. And none too common.

Refreshing about Trey Parker and Matt Stone is that they don't claim to be sages, or saints. Listen to Stone: "Uh, I keep hearing about these undecided voters, and I think, 'Who are these people?' I mean, do you know anybody that doesn't have an opinion about the election? So sure, we get our two cents in the movie, but who are we? A couple of guys so stupid we thought making a movie with marionettes would be fun."

Team America is fun. For some.