Strings attached

Let’s see, how do I put this delicately …

Oh, yeah, “Team America: World Police,” the new film by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, may just be the most outrageous mainstream movie ever released in America.

That includes the collected works of John Waters.

The only reason why Parker and Stone were able to get an R rating, instead of the NC-17 that the MPAA tagged it with, is because they didn’t use real actors.

They used marionettes.

And no matter how many Kama Sutra positions a movie’s characters try, puppets aren’t pornographic.

In many ways, “Team America: World Police,” despite several musical numbers, is your standard action film. It involves a team of “Charlie’s Angels”/”Mission: Impossible”-type special agents, each with a particular talent, whose mission – should they choose to accept it – is to protect not just America but the whole world.

And the enemy this time is … terrorists!

How novel.

The twist is that some evil presence is giving these terrorists – all of whom, naturally, are either swarthy Chechens or Middle Eastern types with beards and turbans – something called “weapons of mass destruction.” It’s not giving anything away to say that the trail Team America follows leads them not to Iraq but to North Korea.

Does the White House know about this?

As they’ve proven over the years, through their “South Park” sitcom and the 1997 “South Park” movie, Parker and Stone are satirists of the most savage sort. Jonathan Swift, he of the Irish baby barbecue, would confess to not being worthy of this serio-comic duo.

In fact, all that holds Parker and Stone back from being hailed as two of the leading serious satirists of their time are the many sexual references and language so profane that it would make George Carlin blush. And don’t forget their relentlessly adolescent sensibilities.

Besides, true satirists need a specific target, and Parker and Stone aim at everything and everyone. A short list of the targets in “Team America” include American jingoism, Hollywood peaceniks, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, machismo, Broadway musicals, “Pearl Harbor” director Michael Bay, United Nations weapons inspectors, TV cop shows, Alec Baldwin, the Screen Actors Guild, Michael Moore, “Jerry Maguire” and Quentin Tarantino.

But whatever their legacy might be, it’s clear that Parker and Stone have fun with their movies. Like nasty boys behind the gym, they’re enjoying themselves. And that feeling is infectious, whether it involves listening to an actor in a musical production titled “Lease” (think “Rent”) singing a song called “Everybody’s Got AIDS” or Kim Jong-Il warbling “I’m so Ronery” (with Parker doing the tongue- twisting imitation of a Korean accent, substituting Rs for Ls).

You never quite forget that the characters are puppets, especially during the fight scenes, but each does make an impression as an individual character.

And those characters comprise a team so inept that it destroys the very places it has sworn to protect (bye-bye Paris). They portray caricatures of characters normally played by the likes of Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis and Cameron Diaz (who so often are caricatures of themselves). And not only do they follow a plot that involves every action cliché known to Hollywood (plus a few it hasn’t yet thought of), they deliver cleverly caustic lines so straightforwardly that we’re in the middle of the next scene before the meaning becomes clear.

But through all this, are Parker and Stone giving us pornography?

Nary a splinter, folks. Just a long, uh, string of hilariously off-color jokes.