Grade: A-

Verdict: Low-brow humor at its funniest.

By BOB LONGINO
Cox News Service

Oh, those "South Park" boys.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "Team America: World Police" is a potty-mouthed, shock-and-awe satire on global terrorism played out with marionettes. It's loud, snotty, obscene, offensive -- and just about the funniest thing at the movies since "There's Something About Mary."

With lowbrow virtuosity, "Team America" deliciously spoofs the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, liberalism and brainless Hollywood action films. Plus, it's a musical -- with full-frontal puppet sex (enough at one point that the film was almost slapped with an NC-17 rating).

There's vomit (lots of it), gore (more than enough of it) and the kind of prolific profanity one might hear if Eric Cartman were unleashed from cable television.

In other words, if you like your social commentary mixed with grade-school humor and shameless incivility, you'll laugh till you cry.

Since surely God can take a joke, so should George Bush and the GOP administration, Hans Blix and United Nations weapons inspectors, Michael Moore, North Korean president Kim Jong-Il and Hollywood liberals including Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. All get skewered in a politically savvy, savagely satirical film that simply never stops to take prisoners.

The Oscar-winning Penn's already complaining, attacking the filmmakers last week in a blistering memo revealed on drudgereport.com. What a misfire. That translates to free advertising many would dub priceless.

"Team America" was inspired in part by the 1960s TV series "Thunderbirds," a clunky sci-fi action drama done with marionettes -- strings showing.

Stone and Parker's film centers on an all-American squad of dimpled dogooders rife with righteous indignation. They sport old-school, E Pluribus Unum names like Lisa, Chris and Sarah and they hunt terrorists across the globe in a helicopter and jets emblazoned with the words, "We protect, we serve, we care." They also, in their enthusiastic bravado, accidentally blow up wonders of the ancient and modern world.

The team recruits Gary, a Broadway musical star. He's needed, as the group's drink-toting leader Spottswoode says, for "his ACTING! " With Gary on board, they can infiltrate terrorist groups and, ultimately, battle global ringleader Kim Jong-Il (who sounds a lot like Eric Cartman).

The film's songs are lyrically more simple and certainly less effectively pointed than those in "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," which included the Oscar-nominated "Blame Canada."

But the sometimes intentionally flawed art direction is, well, almost flawless. The sets upon which the marionettes play out their overacted melodrama — near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, a Cairo street, Mount Rushmore, the Panama Canal — are detailed, expressive and an equisite complement to the stylized puppets.

"Team America" isn't an artistic giant like Stanley Kubrick's equally funny and certainly more chilling Cold War film, "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Not by a longshot.