20 Most Controversial Movies Since 2000
6. Team America: World Police
If any movie can be positively said to have been designed to offend as many people as possible, that movie is Team America: World Police, written and directed by South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone. From beginning to end, Team America throws up one crude stereotype after another while lambasting everything from the arrogance of American imperialism to North Korean dictators.
Using Thunderbirds-style puppets certainly allowed Parker and Stone to go to town on the parodies, and there are more send ups than you can shake a stick at, from Michael Moore to Tony Blair and the Queen. Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson was just one person who found Team America too much to stomach, complaining about the expletives liberally scattered throughout, while the MPAA returned the movie to Parker and Stone no less than 9 times with an NC-17 rating before finally passing it with an R. Predictably, the person most offended by the film was North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who even tried to get the Czech Republic to ban it. They refused.