Excellent review at Armed and Dangerous.
In this satire, it’s the satire you’re supposed to see through. Irony is enlisted to anti-ironic purposes.
Throughout the film, Team America is clumsy, parochial, hamfisted and inadvertently destructive. But this is emphasised mainly in order to point up a continuing underlying message that it’s better to be a dolt with traditional American intentions than a sophisticate in the service of evil.
We watch it blowing up scenery in a parody of the Bruckheimerian action flick, but what’s really being exploded is the fixed categories of the post-1960s culture wars. The South Park guys are trying to divorce the muscular self-confidence of a healthy civilization from the cultural-conservative and religious fixations that confidence has usually been married to. There is not one single reference to Christianity in the entire movie. The good guys drink, swear, and screw like frenzied minks, but they’re good guys just the same.
Might even get me to a movie theater.