Sony Pictures
I think Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have put out some decent movies. Superbad is problematic but good, and This is the End was hilarious and blasphemous. But they also did The Watch, The Green Hornet, and The Interview. Their best movie, 50/50, wasn’t written by them, only produced. So a real mixed bag. Even their recent television show Preacher is a mixed bag. So I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie.
Sausage Party is a simple conceit combined with a bunch of other stuff. What if food was sentient? In a supermarket called Shopwell’s all the food, made out to look whimsical and cartoonish, sing a song about their religion. It’s simple; be good (and stay away from impurity) and stay fresh and the “gods” (meaning customers) will take them into the “Great Beyond” and paradise. Or go bad and get thrown away.
Immediately the song throws a bunch of profanity at you, hoping to elicit laughs at the very idea that a cartoon has curse words. Like the man said, South Park already did it. And much better. The song also incorporates a bunch of ethnic stereotypes, so again, you know where this is going. It just escalates from there.
There are a lot of puns. A lot.
The protagonist is Frank (Seth Rogen), a hot dog in love with a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig). They lust for each other but are saving themselves for the Great Beyond, an obvious religious metaphor. But after some craziness, Frank and Brenda are stranded back in the store away from their aisle, joined by a bagel (Edward Norton doing Woody Allen) and a lavash (David Krumholtz doing vague Middle Eastern). Outside the store, two other hot dogs (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) face the awful truth — that the gods want to eat them.
So two parallel adventures. You get a bunch of silly stereotypes, including Firewater (Bill Hader doing a clichéd Native American accent) and a taco (Salma Hayek doing an impression of herself). Frank begins to discover the awful truth that nobody wants to hear while trying to get him and Brenda home while also avoiding the also anthropomorphized “douche” (Nick Kroll doing Jersey Shore) looking for revenge against Frank and Brenda.
The profanity and sexual humor are kinda overplayed for me here. I got the joke pretty early, and it stopped being inherently funny. I was impressed by the audacity of some of the jokes, but hey, that doesn’t mean it was good. The conceit of a kinda Toy Story ripoff is actually explored, although it gets very weird and meta. I’m still not sure if I like the ending or think it’s stupid.
I feel that Frank is a boring hero, with a generic hero personality. This is no Pixar movie where you care about characters. Here everyone is a vehicle for offensive jokes. Here means it doesn’t always work. For me, it usually doesn’t.
I think the movie is fine, but I know these guys can do it better. The movie tries to get deep with some religious commentary here and there, but it’s all obvious and first year atheist stuff. No real deep points made which means you must see things as just entertaining or not. And it was, but it wasn’t my sort of thing. I think other people will like this one a lot more.
Just leave the kids at home.
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