Knowing Seth Rogen — and the raunchy and often shocking brand of humor he’s famous for — I didn’t saunter into my showing of his newly-released animated feature "Sausage Party" last week expecting to walk away pondering existential questions about the nature of religion and blind faith. But that’s exactly what happened. I mean, the movie was by no means stellar. But it was better than I thought it would be. Let’s talk about it.
It bears mentioning that although "Sausage Party" is fully-animated and has its characters belt out a bouncy musical number within the first few minutes (a la "Beauty and the Beast"), it is by no means family-friendly. The movie is turgid with profanity, innuendos and racial humor — not necessarily the sort of thing you’d want a child to see. Far better for little Johnny or Cindy to have their innocence forever tarnished by attending middle school, which is likely a far more appropriate environment to learn all of your their words and inappropriate slang.
If you’ve seen its trailer, you already know what Sausage Party is about, and have likely already made up your mind on seeing it or not. Just think "Toy Story", but with food, and you’re good to go.
The food items in a grocery store all believe that when they are bought, they enter into a sort of paradise where the gods (those are your average human beings who buy things and eat them, like you and me) take care of them for eternity. A sausage named Frank (Rogen) and his girlfriend Brenda Bunson (Kristen Wiig) fall out of their packages just before they’re purchased. In order to return to their shelf and enter new packages before they’re no longer “fresh” (as being outside of one’s package for too long is considered an offense against the gods) they embark on a quest during which they meet a smorgasbord of colorful characters.
This film’s got a Jewish bagel from the Kosher shelf who always argues with a Middle Eastern wrap-thing from the Halal shelf. There’s also a lesbian taco, a brown box of grits that’s always griping about crackers, and a cannibalistic douche.
Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
Of course, along the way Frank learns the “terrible truth:" Humans don’t care at all about the well-being of their food, they only want to cook and eat it. This amounts to nothing short of torture and murder for Frank and anthropomorphic friends, so they naturally attempt to inform the others and discover a way to end the slaughter before any more of their people are butchered. Most of the other food is reluctant to even question the belief system they were brought up in, however, and they ultimately need a bit of convincing.
I think the narrative of Sausage Party is strong. It has plenty of twists and turns, and a climax I didn’t see coming.
Much of the humor that relies on puns or social commentary will elicit at the very least a chuckle. However, the idea which the film seems to rely on the most for its humor — not only does food walk and talk but it also has loads of sex — does get rather tiresome quickly. The jokes about intercourse were more annoying than amusing by the film’s end. The graphic penultimate scene is a wave of sexual zingers and visuals, so intense that viewers with weak constitutions may want to shut their eyes. I, for one, had a real jones for a hot shower after seeing it.
Overall, Sausage Party is a decent film that ought to be a fun diversion for teenagers, college students, thirty-somethings, people who know what a dank meme is, and anyone else who isn’t too offended when rappers curse in their lyrics. Plus, its message does indeed provide some interesting food for thought.
★★★★☆
