The idea — as gleaned from the trailers on television and in theaters — of an anti-terrorist action film with marionettes, and animatronic faces for their closeups, seemed a good one: a hipper Thunderbirds. But just because a filmmaker — Trey Parker, in partnership with his South Park collaborator, Matt Stone — has one good idea does not mean that others will follow. And yet the entire opening sequence, of the elite American commando unit in a firefight with Middle Eastern terrorists on the streets of Paris, has much to say about Hollywood action films (the puppets, otherwise known as "distancing devices," provide an automatic shortcut to parody) as well as about the jingoist mentality of shoot-first-and-aim-later. Too, the minutely detailed miniature sets are invariably fun. And an air of giddiness can be recaptured at any instant by the herky-jerky movement of the puppets, as when disco-dancing in celebration of a commando victory; or by their scale, as in a montage of D.C. monuments to a country-rock song entitled "Freedom Isn't Free," with a soul-searching marionette standing no taller than the headstones at Arlington National Cemetery. Too often, and for too long at a time, however, the movie gets stuck in adolescence. The lovemaking montage might have been as giddy as the soul-searching montage had it not lost sight of the target of parody and turned into a triple-X lovemaking montage. The obsession with homosexual oral sex is no less off-base. And potty talk is not wit. And vomit, even at fire-hose force and swimming-pool volume, is no funnier from a puppet than from any other creature. And despite the mandate of journalistic balance or satirical indiscrimination, it hardly constitutes a lampoon of Hollywood liberals (poor likenesses of Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, et al.) to conscript them into apologists, and even armed security guards, for North Korea's Kim Jong Il (his speech infected with Elmer Fuddisms), and then to blow their heads off one by one. The trailers, needless to point out, did not have any of that sort of stuff. Which leads to the speculation that maybe the movie would have been better off, in a five-minute Saturday Night Live spot or somewhere, as a make-believe trailer for a nonexistent movie. Maybe it was never really such a good idea for a movie after all. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd