Most big-budget action movies, such as “Armageddon” and “Bad Boys 2,” combine bad dialogue, overblown special effects, and mediocre acting with the goal of making loads of money.

“Team America: World Police,” the latest offering from “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, combines bad dialogue, overblown special effects and mediocre acting into one hilarious movie.

The real catch of “Team America” is that while the actors may seem like they are made of wood in most action movies (think Ben Affleck) the actors in “Team America” actually are made of wood.

Stone and Parker have little love for many actors. So, for this movie, they decided to use wooden puppets, in the style of 1960s TV series “Thunderbirds.” “So many live action movies now, big action movies, are almost animated anyway,” said Stone (BASEketball, South Park) and Parker (South Park, Orgazmo). “Half of (Spiderman) is animated anyway.”

The movie centers on a group calling themselves Team America, a special forces team that travels around the world attempting to stop terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction. The war on terror, though, was secondary.

“While it is political, we noticed as we made it that the politics always kind of took a back seat” the writers said. “They became the setting because politics just aren’t really that funny and it really became a movie about making fun of movies.

“We really modeled this movie after the classic Jerry Bruckheimer structure, which is really a horrible structure when you really look at it, which is really sort of a Joseph Campbell structure.”

“Both ‘Pearl Harbor’ and ‘Top Gun’ have the exact same scene,” Stone and Parker said. “It’s exactly the same scene where it is Tom Cruse and Ben Affleck, they are brash, they are young, they have so much ability but then they get caught (messing) around by their superior and, instead of getting busted, he sends him to Top Gun school or whatever. It’s exactly the same scene. Just one is with Ben Affleck and one is with Tom Cruise. It’s amazing.”

Make no mistake, short of lining up six billion people and insulting each and every one to their faces, there’s no way that Stone and Parker could’ve tried to offend more people. Puppets of Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, Matt Damon and many other notable actors have roles in the movie.

The sound track, much of which was written and performed by Parker, is laden with lyrics along the lines of “America, f**k yeah,” and “Why is Michael Bay making more movies” and no subject, from Middle Eastern languages to Central America (not Real America, according to the movie), is off limits to the satirical slams of the movie. Of course, social and political commentary is nothing new for the creators of South Park, a hugely popular, and allegedly involuntarily, satirical comedy cartoon.

“We just sort of do comedy and you end up doing topical comedy and everyone’s suddenly saying you’re satirous, but it’s not really a conscious thing,” Stone and Parker said.

Of course, just as with any cheesy action movie, “Team America” has the requisite parts. The lead puppet is Gary, an actor turned action hero voiced by Parker. He’s the dark and mysterious main character who attracts the attention of Lisa, the group’s psychologist. It has bad dialogue with plenty of one-liners, bad action, including Matrix-style fighting scenes between puppets and of course, the requisite love scene. In fact, the love scene and its gratuitous puppet sex almost ended up getting the movie an NC-17 rating.

“Our puppets are not anatomically correct. They don’t even have, like, pubic hair. They’re dull and we put them in, like, sexual positions in which obviously everything is completely implied and just a joke and the MPAA was like — No, no, no,” Parker and Stone said.”Barbie dolls can get just as nasty.”

The gratuitous puppet sex scene perfectly represents the whole movie; everything screams overblown, and that’s the idea. “Team America: World Police” combines all the elements of big budget action movies with an all-star cast of puppets to create what may be both the funniest and most offensive movie of the year.

“Team America: World Police” is in theaters now.