Wow

Rating: 8/10 (11 December 2011)

I have always had very mixed feelings about the South Park TV series. On one hand, it is infantile, coarse, graceless, outrageous for the sake of it, and - let's be fair - one of the least sophisticated animated series ever. On the other hand, it has often had some very good points to make, some sharp satire, and it is frequently very funny.
So what of the movie? How do you manage to sustain the triviality of the typical half hour episode for feature length. Well, you start by writing a really good script, which wraps a number of excellent points (not least the free speech issue, with particular reference to bad language ie. South Park itself) in a narrative which effortlessly embraces them all, notwithstanding how daft it is, pepper it with some very catchy songs (and these songs are genuine ear candy, albeit peppered with profanity), crank up the production values (musically and animation effects: the basic animation remains clumsy cut-outs), and you have a film which maintains the appeal of this series, has an underlying seriousness, and is very, very funny.
This is a work of demented genius.