Trey Parker’s diabolically funny "Team America: World Police" presents an interesting dilemma for the conservative right.

One one hand, it stars a bunch of cussing, copulating puppets as loose-cannon commandos who arrogantly lay waste to foreign capitals in the name of American liberty. On the other, it gleefully demonizes Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and other members of Hollywood's liberal elite as toadies of North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il.
To recap: Immoral puppets vs. a long-awaited skewering of Michael Moore. What's a faithful Ann Coulter listener to do?

Laugh your butt off, frankly. Fiendishly crude, roaringly clever, this bipartisan satire of America's adventures abroad lacerates both political camps with equal enthusiasm. It's a crazed, anarchic assault on good taste, with some toe-tapping musical numbers to boot.
Parker, along with fellow “South Park” creator Matt Stone and writer Pam Brady, view the war on terror in the context of a cliché-ridden Hollywood action movie. "Why can't we ever do this the easy way?" one of the Team America crew gripes as he zip-lines into downtown Paris to dispatch a pack of turban-wearing, weapons-of-mass-destruction-toting terrorists.

From their command base deep in the heart of Mt. Rushmore, the five-strong Team America can battle evil-doers anywhere in the world — albeit usually by leaving timeless landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Sphinx in rubble, to the chagrin of world leaders and Hollywood activists alike.

The members of Team America are played not by flesh-and-blood actors, but so-called “super-marionettes” like those popularized in the ’60s British children's adventure show "Thunderbirds." Stiff but oddly lifelike — like embalmed cadavers on strings — the puppets have obvious physical limitations (stiff limbs, wobbly gait) that Parker and Co. gamely exploit for humor.

In another sense, the puppets are better equipped for hard movie work than the Tom Cruises and Julia Robertses of the world. They vomit longer. They die spectacularly. They engage in sex acts so howlingly explicit, sensualist Italian auteur Bernardo Bertolucci would blush.

When the terrorists prepare to launch a strike against the free world, Team America recruits Broadway actor Gary Johnson (Parker) to impersonate an Arab (resulting the in the movie's most dastardly un-P.C. moment) and infiltrate a Cairo-based terrorism cell. Gary's internal struggle over how to use his “power” as an actor is one of the movie's best running gags; “Team America,” underneath it all, is a vicious indictment of Hollywood poseurism.
Secretly commanding the terrorists is Kim Jong Il, portrayed here as a James Bond-style supervillain who hatches his fiendish schemes in a palace filled with pet panthers and killer sharks, to which — in one pointed scene — he feeds U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix. As voiced by Parker, Kim is a testy, foul-mouthed cad, albeit one with a hidden streak of melodramatic suffering, like the lovelorn Satan character in “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.”

Kim’s theme song, “Ronery” (an accented distortion of ‘Lonely”), is the best of a royal assortment of musical elements in “Team America.” In one song, Michael Bay's “Pearl Harbor” is used as a trope for romantic miscommunication. In another, the filmmakers poke fun at the Broadway play “Rent” and its cast of afflicted characters. The theme music for Team America is simply a lusty “America!” followed by an unprintable two-word expletive.
Joining Kim in the movie's "Hidden Fortress"-style finale are the most vocal members of Hollywood's activist community — including puppets resembling Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon — whom Team America dispatches in a hale of blood and bone matter in their efforts to preserve American freedom.

As guiltily satisfying as it is to watch (random example) Janeane Garofalo take an RPG to the head, one suspects that the filmmakers are giving activist actors an unfair rap. Make fun of their self-importance, sure — but why ridicule their group affinity for hybrid cars and rain forests? Those are easy, empty jokes.

There is one moment in "Team America" that approaches seriousness, that seems relatively untainted by whooping satire. It happens when the Panama Canal blows up, scattering lifeless puppet bodies into the water.

Unmistakably unfunny, it suggests that Parker and Stone aren't making light of death and loss in "Team America," but the mad, confused rush of jingoism and pacifism that follow it. Maybe their cynicism has limits, after all.