Before reviewing Team America: World Police, let me state my bias: I think South Park is great.

I've been enamored with the foul-mouthed Colorado grade-schoolers since back when Comedy Central still sucked.

But Team America, the latest film from the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, lingers perpetually between the crude brilliance of the best South Park episodes and the generic repetitiveness of the worst. Its 84 minutes of irreverent humor are about equal in entertainment value to any trio of consecutive episodes from Season seven; i.e. there's plenty of hits and plenty of misses, but very few surprises.

I'll start with the hits. Team America is a puppet flick -- or apparently a "marionette" flick, although I don't quite understand the difference between the two -- and no, this is not in the least bit distracting. Not if you get it, anyway. Parker and Stone's main goal is to lampoon the generic sappiness of summer blockbusters, so the fact that the characters are quite literally wooden adds to this overall effect.

The primary marionettes are Team America, a heroic terrorist-fighting squad with a hideout in Mount Rushmore. They are composed of the prototypical action-movie gang -- including the paternal chief, the brash-but-talented rookie, the sexy blonde, the dull sensitive guy, the Deanna Troi-like "feelings" expert and the untrusting jerk.

Thanks to its super-computer "Intelligence," Team America learns that North Korea's own "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il is coordinating a massive worldwide terrorist attack designed to shatter the foundations of Western civilization. With the help of Chris, a young actor recruited as a spy, they set out to stop his plan.

Kim Jong Il, an explosive megalomaniac with a sensitive core, is definitely the most fun character to watch here: think South Park's Cartman except loaded with weapons of mass destruction as scary as that prospect seems.

His hilarious "I'm Ronery" (i.e.: "lonely" with a ridiculous faux Asian accent) number is just one of 16 songs in Team America, all of which somehow manage to be funny, offensive, slyly satirical and, above all, catchy.

Another of the film's triumphs is the much-talked-about marionette "love scene." The only thing funnier than the scene itself is the fact that the Motion Picture Association of America was actually going to brand the film with an NC-17 rating for its portrayal of puppet penetration.

When the action parody aspect starts to tire itself out, though, the film does lag a bit. Laugh gaps are OK in South Park sometimes, because at least we can relate to Stan, Kyle and Chef, the town's only voices of sanity; when the humor stops in Team America, there's no likeable characters to fall back on and thus the film suffers.

The filmmakers certainly don't reserve any likeable traits for its anti-war activists, a who's who of liberal Hollywood, some of whom are humorously caricatured, others lazily. The Michael Moore marionette exemplifies the latter. Now, I'm no Moore apologist. Quite the contrary, I think there are plenty of incisive, justified ways Parker and Stone could have derided the partisan "documentarian."

But instead they went the obvious route, making fun of Moore for being fat ("Ooh! Nice one. I hear Bush is stupid too!") and, even worse, having him violently attack Team America headquarters, thus furthering the idiotic notion that those who speak against the administration policy are "anti-American."

Ultimately, I guess my review of Team America: World Police boils down to an internal tug-of-war. On one hand, it's extremely funny. Unless The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums director Wes Anderson's December release, trumps it, Team America will almost certainly be the funniest movie any of us will see on the big screen in 2004.

On the other hand, it's a bit disappointing to see that Parker and Stone are pretty much done experimenting, both stylistically and ideologically. They've found a formula they like and accessorized it with a corresponding worldview that's not quite as equal-opportunity offensive as it claims.

C'mon, guys. What would Brian Boitano do?