photo courtesy of Paramount pictures "Team America: World Police" - Puppets with weapons sounds hilarious. And the team of terror fighting police has its moments, but lots of the movie falls flat because of too much preaching and not enough joking.

Violence. Adult language. Explicit sex. How did Trey Parker and Matt Stone get away with it? There must be strings attached.

"Team America" is the newest installment of Trey Parker's and Matt Stone's mission to piss off as many people as possible. Unfortunately, however, they didn't really do much else.

I respect artists who continually push the envelope in order to create a heightened state of freedom of expression. With "Team America," however, it seems that Parker and Stone sacrificed content for empty crudity.

"Team America" is a group of plucky all-American puppets that destroy the world while they are trying to stop the terrorists from destroying it first. Good intentions be damned, they end up doing more harm than good.

Team America is then confronted by left-wing celebrities (members of the Film Actor's Guild) who want to stop them from hurting America.

The terrorist attack that is imminent is thought by the Team to be masterminded by a Middle Eastern group, but it is actually cooked up by Kim Jong Il (political commentary anyone?).

Kim Jong Il's puppet was my favorite part of the movie. He sings a song called "I'm So Ronrey" and expresses a brand of cruel insanity I have never seen on the silver screen.

The other puppet that provided much of the entertainment was Michael Moore. And although he is not on the screen very much, the satire of his role in American politics is the most apt.

The rest of the puppets were mildly entertaining. They were all right aesthetically, but as far as acting goes, they were for shit. The acting was so ... wooden.

As far as the R rating is concerned, I honestly feel that it could have been much more funny if they had slapped an NC-17 rating on it. The blowjob scene in particular would have been shocking - "Brown Bunny"-style. Instead, it was devoid of scandal and something you might see on network television after hours. Yawn.

Surprisingly, this movie isn't very funny. I mean, it is and it's not. There are moments when I was laughing 'til my sides hurt. But then I stopped laughing and had to wait another 15 minutes through dull banter and pointless satire in order to laugh again.

The trailer for this movie is 10 times as entertaining as the actual film, and it was 1 percent of the length. That's economy, folks.

The idea behind "Team America" was brilliant, but the execution was less than. Perhaps I went into the movie with too-high expectations. Either way, I was disappointed. I expect so much more from the boys who brought us the dancing Christmas poop, the talking clit and Saddam Hussein sodomizing Satan.