DaveZ

From what I've seen of South Park, I shouldn't have been too surprised by the content of this film. There are some interesting ideas, and some truly funny bits, but they are all subordinate to the filmmakers' need to make the audience say, "I can't believe they just did that!" Basing humor on shock value only amuses me for a short while. Likewise, the joke that "these are puppets doing this!" wears thin quickly. (By the way, I actually liked the South Park movie even without having seen more than 2 episodes of the TV show)

6 out of 10

When I hated watching the Weird Al Yankovic "classic" UHF the night before I saw this, it was because I thought the jokes were dumb; I knew what the jokes were, and I understood what was supposed to be funny about them, I just didn't find them funny myself. With this film, however, I am at a loss to pinpoint exactly where most of the jokes were.

I am confident that the filmmakers were making a comedy, and not a `very special' Afterschool Special about the cruelty of the teenage years. I was vaguely amused by some bits of the film, and the concepts of a few of the characters were amusing (the cook, the choreographer, etc), but the film seemed to have no idea how to complete the characters and do anything with them, plot-wise. The skylab debris subplot seems dropped in from another movie entirely.

Some of the defenders of the fill on IMDB.COM explain the film as a sort of meta spoof – it's a spoof of spoofs. In that case, MAYBE the point of the semi-graphic gay sex scene was `Look! We'll put a sex scene into the movie, but it will be a GAY sex scene! That's funny!' Ha ha. [And defenders, I think very few people would accuse me of not having a sense of humor.]

I think it is considered a bad sign to find the `making of' featurettes on the DVD considerably more interesting than the movie itself.

I had read the graphic novel upon which this is based and found it somewhat entertaining, but nothing more. The movie drops even a step lower, because it does very little with the interesting concept of literary characters joining into a team; the movie ignores most of what makes these characters unique, and diminishes them into generic action movie heroes.

Visually, the film had its moments, but many of the effects seemed sub-par. The DVD extras informed me that what I thought were unconvincing CGI effects destroying Venice were in fact unconvincing model work. Perhaps the style of effects is the reason why (aside from the outdoor celebration in Venice) there never seemed to be anyone on the streets of any city in the film.