REVIEWED: TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE

Despite its containing both hot marionette sex and the longest vomiting sequence in cinema history, this hysterical lampoon of America's war on terror from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the men behind South Park, fared badly at the US box-office last year. In the run-up to November's election voters seemed to prefer material that reinforced their political beliefs to the sort of unaligned, equal-opportunity hypocrite-bashing which has always characterised the best satire.

Using lovingly crafted puppets hung from absurdly visible strings, the picture relates the adventures of a band of selfless white-bread heroes who have made it their business to rid the world of evil at any cost. The action is presented in the style of Jerry Bruckheimer at his most moronically percussive: "Hey, terrorist," one of the team quips before discharging a rocket launcher. "Terrorise this!" The odd pyramid and the occasional Eiffel Tower may get eliminated in the crossfire, but hey, freedom comes at a price.

In order to infiltrate a particularly fearsome cabal of terrorists, Team America tracks down one of the country's finest actors - first seen singing "Everyone's Got AIDS" in a note-perfect pastiche of the pretentious Broadway show Rent - and asks him to take on the guise of a Middle Eastern terrorist.

Ridiculing the poisonous ideologies drifting about the current US administration would be a worthwhile enterprise, which, I would guess, is why Parker and Stone don't really bother. It is far easier to poke fun at the various Hollywood windbags - Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Matt Damon, Sean Penn, many others - whose pontifications on the State of the World are of such continuing fascination to themselves. And the more unfair the jibes, the funnier they seem: Damon, no fool in real life, can say nothing other than "Matt Damon!"; Sarandon's face is lined with deep, unflattering grooves; Michael Moore becomes a hot-dog wielding suicide bomber.

But the public figure with the most secure case for legal action may be the picture's principal villain, Kim Jong-il. The North Korean leader, whose voice is that of South Park's Eric Cartman with l's replaced by r's, is seen feeding Hans Blix to sharks, plotting to overthrow the world and making friends with "Arec Bardwin". Mind you, the great leader is known to be a movie fan and, watching his character sing I'm So Ronery, the best of the film's many brilliant songs, he may die laughing before getting round to phoning his learned friends.