Brad reviews THE FIRM (1993), starring Tom Cruise!

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Bradley Crain

In honor of Tom Cruise’s 63^rd birthday, I decided to watch THE FIRM, which is based on the 1991 novel from author John Grisham. Cruise stars as the brilliant Harvard law graduate Mitch McBride, who convinces his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) to move to Memphis, TN, so he can join the prestigious Memphis law firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke. With the help of his veteran mentor Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman), Mitch seems to be excelling at his job, and everything is just so perfect. Unfortunately, the good times don’t last as Mitch starts to notice some suspicious stuff going on with the firm, beginning with the mysterious deaths of two of his fellow attorneys. He’s soon approached by FBI agents, led by Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris), who tell him that there are nefarious deeds taking place at the firm, including the laundering of money for the Chicago mob. When Mitch starts questioning the activities of the firm, he finds himself the subject of blackmail and intimidation from the firm’s security officer William Devasher (Wilford Brimley) because the firm will do anything to protect its secrets. Mitch is soon caught between betraying his corrupt employers, who are threatening to kill him, and the FBI, who is pressuring him to expose the firm’s criminal activities. Not wanting to lose his life, go to jail, or get disbarred, Mitch devises an extremely risky plan to outsmart the firm and the FBI, but is even he brilliant enough to pull this one off?!

Back in the early 90’s, it seemed that every other movie being released was adapted from a John Grisham novel, and the very first of those adaptations was THE FIRM in 1993. Extremely successful at the box office, THE FIRM grossed over $270 million worldwide, setting the stage for five new movies based on Grisham novels over the next five years. THE FIRM was not only financially successful, it’s also an extremely effective movie that showcases a 30-year-old Tom Cruise at his very best. Director Sydney Pollack crafted a creepy and paranoid thriller, using a slow-burn buildup that relies on Cruise’s ability to believably go from naïve and starstruck at the beginning, to scared and desperate during the middle portion of the film, and ultimately to resourceful and intelligent at the end, as he navigates the dangerous situations he finds himself in. It’s a dynamic, intense performance, and even with a huge supporting cast of excellent actors around him, Cruise dominates every frame of this film. Other performances that stand out to me are Jeanne Tripplehorn as Mitch’s wife Abby, Wilford Brimley as the firm’s enforcer, Gary Busey and Holly Hunter as a private investigator and his administrative assistant from Little Rock, and David Strathairn as Mitch’s jailbird brother in Arkansas. Gene Hackman is good in his role as Mitch’s corrupted mentor Avery Tolar, but his character is not one of my favorites from the legendary actor. His character has accepted his corruption and learned to cope with it over the years through alcohol and womanizing, just so he can keep making the money. He knows better and that’s the part that ultimately makes him the most pathetic. Ed Harris is also good in the film as the FBI Agent, but his character is kind of an asshole, and it’s fun to see Mitch outsmart him.

I also like the Memphis, Tennessee locations showcased in THE FIRM, locations that I’ve been to many times, such as Beale Street, Mud Island, and The Peabody Hotel. Early in the movie, Cruise’s character flips right along with the “Beale Street flippers,” popular Beale Street entertainers who perform nightly for tips. I’ve given them some of my cash over the years! And the chase sequence that starts at Mud Island and spills over into downtown Memphis is one of the most exciting parts of the movie. My home state of Arkansas even gets in on the action when Mitch meets FBI agent Wayne Tarrance at the Southland Greyhound Park located in West Memphis, Arkansas. The greyhound race track no longer exists at that location, as the final dog race was held on December 31, 2022. The site has now become the Southland Casino, one of three operating casinos in Arkansas, with the other two being the Oaklawn Casino in Hot Springs and The Saracen Casino in Pine Bluff. I also like the fact that the sleazy private investigator, played by Gary Busey, is from Little Rock, Arkansas. I commute to Little Rock daily to work at my accounting and tax firm, and it’s fun imagining that there could be an “Eddie Lomax” somewhere around here.

THE FIRM may not be a perfect film… some fat could have been trimmed out as it runs for over two and a half hours, a lot of time for a “thriller;” and while effective on paper, I also can’t help but wonder if the resolution would have worked quite as well in real life as it’s portrayed in the film. I still love the movie and consider it to be one of Tom Cruise’s best. I revisit it quite often, and I’m glad his birthday gave me another excuse to watch it again today!

STARSHIP TROOPERS and Hell’s Half Acre – Taking my love of the movies on down the road (Part 4)!

Posted on December 28, 2024 by Bradley Crain

2022 was a big year for my wife Sierra and I when it comes to “movie tourism.” I’ve already discussed our trips to Pennsylvania and Colorado to celebrate my healthy obsession with the late, great action movie icon Charles Bronson. In that same year, we spent some time in the beautiful city of Casper, Wyoming. About 40 miles from Casper is a place called “Hell’s Half Acre.” Sierra lived in Casper for 18 years, and she told me that the movie STARSHIP TROOPERS was filmed there. I had no idea. I had watched the movie way back in late 90’s because it was directed by Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch director who had made a star out of Rutger Hauer before coming to America and directing films like ROBOCOP, TOTAL RECALL, and BASIC INSTINCT. I remember it being graphically violent, but I honestly didn’t remember much about it. The fact that it was filmed out in the middle of nowhere outside of Casper piqued my interest, and I was determined to know more.

In a nutshell, STARSHIP TROOPERS stars Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico, a young man who joins the military after graduation to become a citizen, and because of his love for his high school sweetheart Carmen (Denise Richards). As part of his service, he finds himself in a war against the bug aliens of Klendathu. Every day is a battle for survival as the soldiers try to save the human race. Aside from Van Dien and Richards, director Verhoeven has assembled an excellent supporting cast that includes veterans like Michael Ironside, Clancy Brown, and even Rue McClanahan. Maybe it’s because I visited the location, but I enjoyed the movie much more now, than I remember enjoying it back in the 90’s.

Hell’s Half Acre stood in for the alien planet of Klendathu in STARSHIP TROOPERS. It’s an interesting looking area that reminds me of the look of the Grand Canyon when viewed from afar. It turned out to be the perfect place for an alien planet, even if there was always a chance that the cast and crew might run into a rattlesnake or two. Here’s a picture I took of the sign on the premises that tells you a little more about Hell’s Half Acre.

The picture at the top of the article shows how Hell’s Half Acre is used in the movie to represent the alien planet of Klendathu. Here’s an image of the movie’s star, Casper Van Dien, on location. I met several people in Casper who remember when the actors and the crew were staying in Casper during filming, and they all spoke very positively of Van Dien. I also find it interesting that Casper Van Dien is filming this movie just outside of Casper, Wyoming. What are the chances?

Here are few of the pictures we took on our visit. I sent the picture below to my son while we were out of town and asked him if he knew where we were. His guess was The Grand Canyon!

Making movies is one hell of a business, and visiting Hell’s Half Acre was a great reminder of the imagination it takes to create movie magic. It was also a fun way to spend part of day, especially for a movie lover like me!

The Films of 2024: Unfrosted (dir by Jerry Seinfeld)

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Unfrosted is a thoroughly amiable and goofy comedy about the invention of the Pop Tart.

Taking place in an imaginary 1963, Unfrosted tells the story of the Cereal Wars. Kellog’s and Post are competing for dominance in the kids breakfast food market, dominating the scene while the dour folks at Quaker can only shake their heads in holier-than-thou shame. Bob Cabana (played by the film’s director, Jerry Seinfeld) is a Kellog’s exec who spends his day dealing with pompous cereal mascots (led by a hilarious Hugh Grant) and the somewhat random whims of his boss, Edsel Kellog III (Jim Gaffigan). He dreams of someday having a lawn made out of sod and also having enough money to send his kids to a good college. “Those colleges can cost $200 a year!” he says, at one point.

Life is good until he discovers that Post — headed up by Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) — is developing a type of new breakfast food that could revolutionize the industry and dethrone Kellog’s as America’s top cereal company. Bob gets Edsel’s permission to try to create something that will beat Post’s new product to the shelves. But first, Bob has to go to NASA and convince brilliant engineer Donna “Stan” Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) to abandon the moon project and return to Kellog’s. “You know we’re never going to land on the moon,” Bob tells her.

Soon, the entire nation is riveted by the competition between Post and Kellog’s. Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) reports on every development, in between complaining about his wife and playing with silly putty. The Russians decide to help Post, leading the world to the brink of nuclear war while President Kennedy (Bill Burr) spends his time with the Doublemint Twins. Harry Friendly (Peter Dinklage), head of the milk syndicate, warns that kids better not stop eating cereal while Bob finds himself being menaced by a sinister milkman (Christian Slater). A German scientist (Thomas Lennon) and Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) combine a sea monkey with a square of ravioli, leading to a new life form that lives in the Kellog’s ventilation system. Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), the bicycle guy, risks his life to test a prototype while a super computer is shipped to Vietnam and turns into Colonel Kurtz and….

Okay, you’re getting the idea. This is a silly, joke-a-minute film that is in no way meant to be taken seriously. It’s obvious that Seinfeld and his co-writers greatly amused themselves while writing the script and your amusement will depend on whether or not you’re on the same wavelength. I enjoyed the film, because I love history and I love pop culture and I like random homages to other films. Not all of the jokes landed. There’s a lengthy Mad Men parody that, while funny, still feels several years too late. But, for the most part, I enjoyed the amiable goofiness of it all.

Unfrosted is currently getting some savagely negative reviews but that has more to do with Seinfeld’s recent comment that the “extreme left” was ruining comedy. Though most people would probably consider Seinfeld’s comment to be common sense (and would also realize that Seinfeld was condemning the “extreme” as opposed to liberalism in general), the online folks, many of whom were already angry over Seinfeld’s outspoken support of Israel, were scandalized and most mainstream film reviewers today never want to get on the bad side of an online mob, regardless of how annoying that mob may be. (Even a positive review in The Hollywood Reporter contained an odd passage in which the reviewer seemed to beg forgiveness for giving a non-condemnatory review to a film made by someone on the other side.) Of course, there are also some reviewers who are currently overpraising this film as a way to “own the libs.” The fact that a film as silly and inoffensive as this one could suddenly find itself at the center of the culture war tends to prove Seinfeld’s point.

The important thing is that Unfrosted is amusing and, in the end, rather likable. I enjoyed it.

October True Crime: The Frozen Ground (dir by Scott Walker)

Posted on October 16, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the early 80s, Robert Hansen was a respected businessman in Anchorage, Alaska. He owned a restaurant. He was known for being a family man. He held several local hunting records. Almost everyone who met him described him as being friendly and good-natured. In those days before the Internet, it wasn’t as if someone could do a Google search and discover that Hansen had a long criminal record in both Iowa and Alaska. There was no way to know that Hansen had been a teenage arsonist and that had been arrested and charged with rape in the early 70s. (The charges were ultimately plea bargained down to assault.) Even those who did know about his background felt that Hansen had turned his life around and was now an upstanding member of society.

At the same time that Hansen was a respected member of the Anchorage community, he was abducting young women and, after holding them prisoner and raping him at his cabin, flying them into the Alaskan wilderness where he would then hunt them in his own version of The Most Dangerous Game. It’s known, for sure, that Hansen murdered at least 18 women. It’s felt that the number is much higher. Along with his own good reputation, Hansen was protected by the fact that many of his victims were transients and sex workers. Their disappearances were rarely reported to the police and, when they were, the police didn’t go out of their way to find them. Much as happened with the Green River Killer in Washington State, Hansen was able to get away with his crimes for over 20 years not because he was particularly clever but because his victims were considered to be on the fringes of society.

The 2011 film, The Frozen Ground, is a fictionalized account of the investigation that led to Hansen’s arrest. John Cusack plays Robert Hansen. Nicolas Cage plays Jack Holcombe, a weary Alaskan state trooper who has to deal with uncooperative witnesses and beaurocratic indifference while investigating Hansen’s crimes. Vanessa Hudgens plays Cindy Paulson, a 17 year-old sex worker who survives her encounter with Hansen but whose story is originally ignored by the police because of what Cindy does for a living. Both Jack and Hansen comes to realize that Cindy is the only person who can positively identify the killer but Cindy has disappeared into the Anchorage underworld, working as a stripper and being manipulated by her pimp, Clate Johnson (50 Cent).

Taking full of advantage of the chilly atmosphere and the isolation of the Alaskan wilderness, The Frozen Ground is an effective journey into the heart of darkness, featuring excellent performances from Nicolas Cage and John Cusack. Cusack smoothly alternates between being the arrogant hunter and the desperate prey while Cage’s weary expression captures the psychological toll of investigating the crimes of someone like Robert Hansen. Of course, when the film came out, it received a lot of attention for featuring Vanessa Hudgens in a dramatic role. Hudgens’s performance here continues the tradition of former Disney (and Nickelodeon) actresses trying to prove their range by playing an edgy role. Though there’s a few scenes where she does seem to be trying too hard to make sure that we all know she’s capable of more than High School Musical, Hudgens is convincing for the most part.

As for the real-life Robert Hansen, he was sentenced to spend 461 years in prison for his crimes. (Alaska has no death penalty.) In 2014, three years after the release of this film, the 75 year-old Hansen died of natural causes while still incarcerated.

In the Line of Duty: Hunt For Justice (1994, directed by Dick Lowry)

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

When New Jersey State Trooper Philip Lomonaco (Dan Lauria) pulls over a car for having mud on its license plate, he doesn’t know that the car is being driven by two members of the United Freedom Front, a group of left-wing revolutionaries. While Lomonaco talks to Tom Manning (Miguel Ferrer), Dickie Williams (Dell Yount) opens fire. Lomanaco is killed and Tom and Dickie flee to their safehouse in New England. While the United Freedom Front plots their next series of bombings and bank robberies, Lomonaco’s ex-partner (Nicholas Turturro) teams up with an FBI agent (Adam Arkin) to track down the terrorists and get justice for his fallen friend.

Hunt For Justice was the ninth of NBC’s In The Line of Duty films. The previous films featured religious cults, anti-tax protestors, drug lords, and mobsters. In this one, the antagonists are all former 60s radicals who are still trying to overthrow the system. The FBI views the United Freedom Front as being a threat to national security while Lomonaco’s partner just wants to make sure that Lomonaco’s death won’t go unpunished. Dan Lauria was actually a mainstay of the In The Line of Duty films, appearing previously in A Cop for the Killing and and Ambush in Waco. (Nicholas Turturro was previously featured, on the other side of the law, in Mob Justice.) Since most people who watch this film will probably remember Lauria as being Kevin Arnold’s father in The Wonder Years, everyone will want his killers to be brought to justice.

As with the previous In The Line of Duty movies, the action is evenly divided between law enforcement and the criminals that they’re pursuing. At first, Miguel Ferrer seems like odd-casting as a leftist who admires Che Guevara but he gives a good performance as someone who regrets some of the decisions that he made in the past but who knows that he can’t change them now. Melissa Leo is also very good as his wife. Stephen Root and Dean Norris, two other actors who you would not necessarily expect to see playing left-wing revolutionaries, are cast as the other members of the United Freedom Front and Hunt For Justice does a good job of contrasting their middle class lifestyles with their revolutionary rhetoric. One of the ironies of the film is that the revolutionaries are leading much more comfortable and financially-stable lives than the men who are trying to hunt them down. In fact, the main problem with the movie is that the revolutionaries are so interesting that it’s always a letdown when the action shifts over to Turturro and Arkin, whose characters are far less interesting. Arkin and Turturro go through the expected paces. The FBI doesn’t like it when local cops try to interfere with their investigations. Who knew?

Hunt for Justice is a pretty standard In The Line of Duty movie but no movie featuring Miguel Ferrer, Melissa Leo, and Stephen Root is ever going to be a total loss. The cast is the best thing that Hunt For Justice has going for it.

Guilty Pleasure No. 37: Death Wish (dir by Eli Roth)

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Is it finally safe to honestly review Death Wish?

You may remember that this film, a remake of the 70s vigilante classic, came out last March and critics literally went insane attacking it. That it got negative reviews wasn’t necessarily a shock because the movie was directed by Eli Roth and he’s never been a favorite of mainstream critics. Still, it was hard not to be taken aback but just how enraged the majority of the critics appeared to be. Seriously, from the reviews, you would have thought that Death Wish was not just a bad movie but a crime against nature.

Of course, a lot of that was due to the timing of the film’s release. The film was released less than a month after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. At the time the film first came out, the country was in the midst of a daily diet of anti-second amendment rallies and David Hogg. Many critics accused Death Wish of being a commercial for the NRA. Others branded the film as being right-wing propaganda. In fact, the criticism was so harsh that it was hard not to feel that the critics were essentially taking Death Wish far more seriously than it took itself.

If anything, Death Wish is a big, glossy, and rather silly movie. Bruce Willis stars as Dr. Paul Kersey. Paul is a peace-loving man. We know this because he refuses to get into a fight with a belligerent parent at a soccer game. He’s also an emergency room doctor, the type who pronounces a policeman dead and then rushes off to try to save the life of whoever shot him. No one in the movie suspects that Paul would ever become a vigilante but we know that there’s no way he can’t eventually end up walking the streets with a loaded gun because he’s played by Bruce Willis. When Paul backs down from the fight at the soccer game, Willis delivers his dialogue with so much self-loathing that we just know that, once Paul gets back home, he’s going to lock himself in the basement and start yelling at the walls, Stepfather-style.

Eventually, criminals break into Paul’s house and shoot both his wife (Elisabeth Shue) and his daughter (Camila Morrone). His wife dies. His daughter ends up in a coma. Paul spends a day or two in shock and then he promptly gets a gun and starts shooting criminals. Eventually, this brings him into conflict with the same criminals who attacked his family! Meanwhile, two detectives (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) look at all the dead bodies piling up around them and just shrug it off. At one crime scene, Norris is happy to grab a slice of pizza.

And really, that’s it. It sounds simple because it is simple. There is absolutely no narrative complexity to be found in Death Wish, which is why, in its own cheerfully crude way, the film totally works. In real life, of course, vigilante justice is not the solution and the death penalty is often unfairly applied but, from the moment the opening titles splash across the screen, Death Wish makes clear that it has no interest in real-life and, throughout its brisk running time, it literally seems to be ridiculing anyone in the audience who might be worried about the moral ramifications of a citizen gunning down a drug dealer.

Death Wish is a big extravagant comic book. It takes Paul one scene to go from being a meek doctor to being an expert marksman and, when Paul dispatches one criminal by dropping a car on him, Roth lays on the gore so thick that he almost seems to be daring us to take his film seriously. By that same token, Paul kills a lot of people but at least they’re all really, really bad. In fact, the criminals are so evil that you can’t help but suspect that Roth is poking a little bit of fun at the conventions of the vigilante genre. Even the fact that Willis wanders through the entire film with the same grim expression on his face feels like an inside joke between the director and his audience.

The critics were right when they called Death Wish a fantasy but they were wrong to frame that as somehow being a flaw. It’s a cartoonishly violent and deeply silly film and yet, at the same time it’s impossible not to cheer a little when Paul reveals that he’s been hiding a machine gun under his coffee table. It’s an effective film. Eli Roth delivers exactly what you would expect from a film about Bruce Willis killing criminals in Chicago. It may not be a great film but it works.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Playing Catch-Up With The Films of 2017: Fist Fight (dir by Richie Keen)

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

While I wouldn’t begin to argue that it’s been a great year for movies, there were still some really good movies released in 2017.

Unfortunately, there were also some really bad ones.

Which do you think Fist Fight was?

If you answered really bad, congratulations!

Actually, I don’t think anyone was expecting Fist Fight to be a classic or anything like that. Basically, the film is about a conflict between two teachers, a conflict that seems destined to end with the event promised by the title. The two teachers are played by Ice Cube and Charlie Day. Of course, in the movie, they have different name but it doesn’t matter. Neither character has an identity outside of the actor who plays him. Charlie Day is nerdy and quick to yell. Ice Cube is tough and intimidating and not the type to back down from a fight.

Now, at the risk of losing all credibility, I’m going to be honest about something. When I first saw the trailer for Fist Fight, I thought it might not be as bad as it turned out to be. Charlie Day is hilarious on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. One of the more appealing things about Ice Cube is his willingness to poke fun at his tough guy image. More often than not, I tend to like movies about teachers acting like children because, when I was in school, I always suspected that was the way teachers actually behaved when they were safely in the teacher’s lounge. Charlie Day desperately running around the school, hyperventilating while Ice Cube pops up to remind him that they have a fist fight scheduled? Seriously, it sounded like it could be funny in a dumb way.

Well, I was wrong. Fist Fight is one of the most painfully unfunny films that I’ve ever seen. This is a movie that should have been focused on one thing: the fist fight at the end of the day. The entire movie should have been Charlie Day preparing for a fight that he knows he can’t possibly win. Instead, the movie kept getting distracted with unnecessary subplots. For instance, because it’s the last day before summer, all of the students are pulling pranks on their teachers. In fact, the entire student body is out-of-control. But who cares? We’re here to see Charlie Day try to throw a punch at Ice Cube. We don’t care about a bunch of obnoxious students pulling pranks that seem like they were directly lifted from a Crown International high school movie. If we want to see that, we can rewatch The Pom Pom Girls or Joy of Sex. And if we want to watch a teacher stand up to his students, we can watch Class of 1984.

The film is full of funny people but it never really takes advantage of them. Actors like Tracy Morgan, Kumail Nanjiani, and Christina Hendricks pop up but just as quickly disappear. Charlie Day does his best but the level of writing never rises to the level of It’s Sunny In Philadelphia. (I personally would love to see “The Gang Gets In A Fist Fight With Ice Cube.”) Compared to Fist Fight, even something like Horrible Bosses looks like nuanced and subversive humor. There’s a lot of screeching in Fist Fight but very little of it is funny.

Shattered America #73: Team America: World Police (dir by Trey Parker)

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, are we once again allowed to watch Team America: World Police?

As you may remember, back in December, the entire nation totally freaked out over the possibility that North Korea might be offended by the James Franco/Seth Rogen comedy The Interview. Hackers — who many assumed were working for North Korea — released embarrassing emails that were exchanged among Sony executives and filmmakers. Barely literate threats were posted, warning that any theater showing The Interview would be blown up. Common sense should have told us that these were empty threats but instead, everyone panicked.

Sony announced that they would not be releasing The Interview. The film would never see the light of day. Overdramatic people like me got on twitter and announced that, if Sony didn’t release The Interview, then free speech was dead. “It is every American’s duty to see The Interview!” I tweeted, “If you don’t see The Interview, you’re letting the terrorists win!”

Then Sony changed their mind and released The Interview after all. People got to watch it. Critics got to slam it. Free speech lived for yet another day.

As for me, I never got around to watching it.

Uhmm, anyway…

What got forgotten in all of this drama is that some theaters announced that they would show the 2004 film Team America: World Police in the place of the Interview. In many ways, it was a brilliant idea. Team America, after all, is a brilliantly profane satire from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Not only was the film a parody of overdone Hollywood blockbusters but it also featured the members of Team America using their powers to take out Kim Jong-il, the father of the political leader targeted for assassination in The Interview. Even better than that, it featured Team America violently destroying the vapid (and surprisingly well-armed) celebrities who Kim Jong-il had tricked into supporting him. How can you not love a film that features a puppet of Michael Moore blowing itself up?

Oh, did I mention that the entire movie features puppets? Because it so does!

The use of puppets allows Parker and Stone to not only create some spectacular action scenes but also to feature parodies of more than a few real-life celebrities, all of whom are portrayed as being stupid, trendy, and easily manipulated. The fact that Sean Penn saw himself lampooned in the film and then wrote an angry letter to Parker and Stone (ending it with, “Fuck you!”) is one of many reasons to love Team America.

So, we weren’t going to get to see The Interview but at least we could see Team America. But then Paramount Pictures announced that they were not going to let any theater show Team America. As annoyed as I was by what happened with The Interview, the ban on Team America was even more annoying.

I mean, we all knew The Interview as probably a really bad film. But we also knew that Team America was great! Indeed, banning Team America seemed like exactly the type of thing that one of the film’s puppet celebrities would have demanded.

Plus, as Team America‘s theme song reminded us — “America! Fuck yeah!” Bowing down to dictators does not make anyone want to shout, “America! Fuck yeah!”

More like, “America! Fuck no!”

Anyway, eventually Sony relented and released The Interview. But I haven’t heard anything about Team America. However, it’s currently available on Netflix so I’m going to assume that it is once again legal to watch Team America. But that doesn’t change the fact that I still felt like I was breaking the law when I recently rewatched it.

Yet another reason to love Team America: World Police.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPBX47zSktc