Sausage Party - Review Thread

I can't tell if I am getting old and crotchety, or if the jokes were just too juvenile. Also, the end of this took the ending of Perfume to a whole other level.

A decent movie, but entirely forgettable, and awkwardly crude.

5/10 (average)

I felt the same way.  I'm kind of surprised at the 82% on Rotten Tomatoes.  The film is just way too one-note in its jokes and narrative. 

R-rated animated comedies are not exactly unheard of and there is a ton of animated content for adults on television, but it’s still somewhat rare to see millions of dollars invested into an animated comedy which is completely aimed at adults. That alone helps Sausage Party stand out from the annual crop of raunchy comedies, but the film is further set apart from other R-rated animated comedies by the fact that the film is deliberately emulating the Pixar model, wherein a group of inanimate objects/animals/feelings are personified and their setting is translated to a world which somewhat resembles are own. The film’s trailer plays into this, with the fact that’s actually a film for adults being something of a twist. It would be easy to see this trailer and awesome Sausage Party be nothing more than an R-rated spoof of Pixar films, but there’s actually much more going on here.

The film takes place primarily in a grocery store called Shopwell’s where all of the food items are personified, though they’re talking and walking around goes unnoticed by the human characters. These food items believe the various shoppers are Gods who take them to “The Great Beyond”, an act the food look to with tremendous excitement. The sausage Frank (Seth Rogen) is even more excited as it means you can finally enter his girlfriend; the hotdog bun Brenda (Kirsten Wig). One fateful day, both Frank and Brenda’s packages are chosen by the same woman. However an accident prevents Frank and Brenda from joining their packages in “The Great Beyond”, and in fact sets Frank on a path of learning that everything he’s been brought up to believe could be false.

In truth, Sausage Party feels less like a parody of Pixar and more like a film just following their formula. In fact it isn’t too hard to imagine a Pixar version of this premise. Like the Toy Story films, Sausage Party personifies inanimate objects and places them in a somewhat grounded world which gradually becomes more ridiculous as the film goes on, eventually leading to a sort of action climax. There isn’t much effort to in fact to spoof Pixar; Sausage Party is actually interested in a far more heavy topic; religion. This isn’t really apparent in the trailers, but Sausage Party is very much an exploration, and even something of an attack, on religious belief. The film observes the way religion is used as a means of social control, how people often cling to their beliefs when faced with challenging evidence rather than questioning them, and how groups have historically twisted religious doctrine in order to fit their own ideological beliefs. This is a lot more ambitious than I expected from a film whose title is a pun on dicks but the execution is surprisingly smart and bold.

This examination of religion is not very subtle, in fact characters discuss the core themes pretty openly, but for a broad comedy like this that’s okay. What’s more is that, as a comedy, this film works very well. For the most part, I laughed a lot from start to finish. The humour stems from the witty crudeness, visual food gags and puns, and some genuinely funny references. The last twenty minutes in particular are like an explosion of comedy, with tons of big gags, profanity laced lines, and outrageous visual comedy. I also think there’s some inherent humour in seeing such a silly concept used to explore such lofty ideas. I mean, the film is about a talking sausage questioning his faith; that in itself is pretty funny. Granted, the humour here isn’t exactly perfect. At times, the film does fall back on crudeness for its own sake with nothing else really going on within the moment. This is particularly frustrating considering the film’s intellectual ambitons. There is also a largely distasteful gag with some rapey vibes. I’m not one to immediately dismiss a joke for dwelling on something dark or horrible, but this scene was really unfunny and just made me uncomfortable. I wish it were executed differently.

Sausage Party is a much smarter film than I expected it to be and it also made me laugh a whole heck of a lot. It’s a film that makes strong use of the typical Seth Rogen character and the nature of voice work allows the rest of the cast to do some really interesting and surprising stuff. And yet in spite of all that, I can’t endorse the film quite as much as I would like to. It’s just a little too inconsistent, and some of its stumbles are noticeable enough that they do really start to detract from the whole. In spite of those flaws though, Sausage Party still comes through as one of the better films to come out this summer and it’s well worth a look for those who can handle a lot of vulgarity.

B+

Sausage Party(8/13/2016)

I think it’s pretty close to undeniable at this point that Seth Rogen is the most consistently impressive comedy star working in Hollywood. It hasn’t even been a full ten years since his first major starring role in Knocked Up and he’s already amassed a strong filmography with films like
Pineapple Express, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Observe and Report, and 50/50 under his belt and he’s also very deftly avoided putting out stinkers the way that many of his peers in comedy have. Even more impressive, he’s managed to carve out a comic identity distinct from his original mentor Judd Apatow with his time in the spotlight, especially with the films that he’s not only starred in but also written or directed alongside his frequent collaborator Evan Goldberg. These directorial efforts have all had the distinction of being noticeably more outlandish and ambitious than the average comedy and have almost always had more going on in them than their initial trailers suggest. Their 2013 hit This is the End initially looked like a weird gimmicky thing but it turned out to be this really crazy apocalyptic movie with some real insights into friendship and morality and then their 2014 film The Interview actually managed to cause an international incident as he attempted to skewer a real world dictator. But Rogen and Goldberg seem to have topped themselves in the audacious lunacy department with their latest effort (which they technically didn’t direct but are clearly the driving creative forces behind): a CGI raunchy R-rated animated film about talking food products.

The film is set in a grocery store where all the food items are alive and capable of walking and talking (unbeknownst to the customers and staff) and believe that all the humans are gods who will, by purchasing them, take them to “the great beyond” which they think to be some kind of paradise. Specifically the film follows a hot dog named Frank (Seth Rogen) who considers a hot dog bun in an adjacent package named Brenda Bunson (Kristen Wiig) to be his girlfriend. He and the other hot dogs in his package including Carl (Jonah Hill) and Barry (Michael Cera) are excited to be going to the great beyond soon as there’s an upcoming 4th of July sale coming up and think they’re sure to be selected by “the gods.” Soon though there’s a mishap that leaves him and Brenda removed from their packages and stranded in the store along with a bagel named Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) and a Lavesh named (Kareem Abdul Lavash) who are constantly bickering about who should have the most space in their aisle. Brenda just wants to find her way back to their aisle so that they can hopefully find their way into another package and be selected again for the great beyond, but Frank has an overwhelming feeling that something strange is going on and he’s heard rumors of a wise old food item named Firewater (Bill Hader) who seems to know that there’s more to life in this store than meets the eye.

Clearly this movie was meant to be something of a parody of the Pixar animation studio, specifically their obsession with making movies about talking inanimate objects. What I maybe didn’t expect was that they would also try to imitate Pixar’s interest in using said talking objects to say deeper things than you might expect. Specifically this movie is interested in using talking food to examine the various ways that people divide each other while also looking at the function of religion in society. Let’s specifically focus on the movie’s take on religion because it’s in many ways a lot bolder than any of the swearing or the sex jokes. This is one of the most proudly atheistic movies to ever come out of Hollywood. The allegory isn’t subtle, the “gods” that the food products worship are established as being “bullshit” that was made up to make people feel better about their fates and that these beliefs are constantly being distorted to give people excuses to hurt each other. The one place the movie stumbles on this is towards the end where Frank gets pushback for not respecting other people’s beliefs once he learns the truth, then tries again by essentially saying “I respect your beliefs but…” and then more or less says the exact same thing as before and this somehow changes everyone’s mind right away. Granted, greater thinkers than Seth Rogen have tried and failed to find “respectful” ways to explain to people that their belief systems are predicated on lies, but he still falls a bit short here.’

So the movie is smarter than it looks, but is it as funny as it looks? Not exactly. It’s weird, the movie’s jokes seem awfully similar to the kind of material that normally makes me laugh in movies from Rogen and co but they never really seem to land as well here and the best I can guess is that it’s because of the animation. I’m reminded a bit of a Christmas special on the show “Community” that was done in the style of a 60s Rankin Bass special. It was a really clever episode and I admired the vision involved in making it but the comedy never really worked for me in part because the chemistry between the cast that was so central to the show’s success just didn’t seem to connect the same because they were voicing puppets instead of interacting face to face. It’s weird, this certainly isn’t a problem I have when watching something like South Park or BoJack Horseman but something about seeing comedians I’m used to seeing in the flesh hidden behind animation that never quite connects the same way for me. It’s almost like an uncanny valley of comedy.

Now none of that is to say I found the movie to be actively unfunny, I didn’t, I just didn’t feel like it made me laugh as much as it should have given all the outrageousness and the people behind it. So, this is a comedy that I didn’t think was funny enough, which would seem to be a pretty damning indictment, but it really isn’t and I actually rather like the movie overall. Whatever the movie lacks in belly laughs it makes up in chutzpah. It isn’t exactly subtle, it trades a bit uncomfortably in racial stereotypes, and isn’t above making some rather lowbrow jokes, but often it’s just crazy enough to work. It’s not every day you see a CGI animated movie about food that walks, talks, and fucks and the fact that Rogen was able to turn that weird stoned daydream of a concept into a workable movie with a bit of social insight is… well there’s just something admirable about that any way you cut it. It’s definitely not a movie for everyone but if the film’s trailer and advertising leave you intrigued rather than disgusted you will likely find that the actual movie exceeds you expectations.

*** out of Five