I Just Saw

“Remember what the MPAA says: horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words! That’s what this war is all about!”

Such is the cry of an impassioned mother in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s big screen outing for their most famous creation.

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is extremely profane; it’s also an excellent musical and as caustic and funny a satire of censorship as you’ll see.

The story is that good friends Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman, all of whom are around 9 years old, go to see the Terrance & Phillip movie, wherein the crude Canadian comedians make mindless jokes while singing obscene songs. This gives the boys and their classmates a rash of potty mouth, leading their parents to take up arms against Canadian influence on their youth before the American military follows suit, declaring war. Meanwhile, Satan prophesies 3 million years of darkness when Terrance & Phillip are slain, to the delight of his new boyfriend: Saddam Hussein.

I was planning to describe the movie as a good snapshot of comedy and pop culture in the early 2000s before looking it up and seeing that it actually came out in 1999. That’s obvious in retrospect – Bill Clinton’s still the president and Saddam Hussein (credited as “himself”) is depicted much as Putin would be now and Kim Jong-Il was in the same team’s Team America: World Police (2004); as in, a relevant cultural boogeyman. But it still threw me for a loop that this movie was pre-9/11 and came out the same year as Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace.

Still, it remains a good avatar for where adult animation was before it became nihilistically bad in the 2010s. The success of South Park the movie is arguably responsible for the move towards vulgarity and violence in “grown-up” cartoons. But where a piece of trash like Netflix’s Paradise PD, Brickleberry, or the last ten to fifteen years of Family Guy is merely inane, vacuous, asinine, juvenile, mean-spirited slop, Parker and Stone are the poets of vulgarity.

Getting your characters to say “s~~~” is Level 1. Getting them to say “Eat penguin s~~~, you a~~-belonger” is Level 2. South Park the movie is Level 2 comedy from the top down. All through the film, you’ll see gags that in other movies would have stopped a beat or two earlier. Like when Canada bombs the Baldwins right after one of them says that there’s nothing bad about being a Baldwin. In another film that would be it. In South Park? One of them survives and jeers “Ha ha you missed me!” only to be blown up by a straggling jet.

The Level 2 humour is not due so much to Parker and Stone’s more thoughtful, political themes than those utilised by their imitators, although that’s a factor. It’s more because, at a fundamental level, they’re just much better writers and storytellers. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a lot more than an adaptation of a TV show; it’s genuinely cinematic, with stirring songs and strong characters. It’s hilariously offensive and offensively hilarious, but it’s also more suited to the big screen than many films that aren’t rooted in television.

Rating: 3.5/4