The R-rated Sausage Party is an ugly computer animated film – a putrid, gross-out, lowbrow spoof of the kind of quality cartoon features that Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks usually put out. There are so many levels on which to trash Sausage Party. But I’ll start with the most basic. It’s supposed to be a comedy and it simply isn’t funny.
The setting is Shopwell’s, a grocery store where various fruits, vegetables and other assorted products await their time to be purchased. They sing about “The Great Beyond” a wonderful place where they ultimately end up once the “gods” (shoppers) select them. Can we start with the fact that the lyrics to this song are really hard to understand? I don’t know if it was the sound mix or just the singers’ failure to enunciate clearly, but most of the words were unintelligible. I got the gist of it though. “The Great Beyond” is a magnificent place where all food aspires to go. It’s kind of like the afterlife if you haven’t picked up on the not-so-subtle metaphor. The star is Frank (Seth Rogen) a wiener that wants to be paired up with his girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig), a hot dog bun.
Then one day a jar of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to Shopwell’s with news of his experience. Once you leave the store, he says, the gods will eat you and your life is over. That’s it. Nothing more. “The Great Beyond” is a lie. After being chosen once again by a different shopper, Honey Mustard, attempts to leap off the cart. Frank tries to save him. This sets off a chain of events where several other products fall off the cart. Besides Frank and Brenda, there’s Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz), a flatbread, Sammy Bagel Jr.(Edward Norton), a bagel who does a Woody Allen impression circa 1973, and a Douche (Nick Kroll) who appropriately enough, acts like an obnoxious bro. The display of causalities is like a scene out of Saving Private Ryan. It’s the sole amusing moment in the entire picture.
Sausage Party is a movie in which the filmmakers seemingly started out with a question, Wouldn’t it be amusing if cute animated characters dropped a lot of F-bombs? Then proceeded to beat the idea into the ground. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s 2016. If this is your interpretation of pushing the boundaries of comedy, you haven’t watched a film in the past 50 years. The joy of hearing the F word coming out of the mouths of cuddly figures is already pretty debatable. For me, it lost its luster when I graduated from the 4th grade, but hey – to each his own. Great writers can make anything humorous, even a cartoon tangentially about atheism. Sausage party is co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and like all their works (Pineapple Express, The Interview, The Night Before), their drug-addled mentality is probably funnier if you’re already half baked. Me? I was stone cold sober and apparently so was the entire audience I saw this with. You could’ve heard a pin drop at any time throughout its running time. That is until the very end when a food orgy did elicit some guffaws from a few theater patrons.
This production presents the skimpy plot of an 8 minute short, not an 88-minute feature. The screenwriters toss in some jokes along the way – mostly ethnic stereotypes. Let’s see, a German tub of sauerkraut with a Hitler ‘stache wants to exterminate the “juice”. The lavash and the bagel are mortal enemies who bicker over their occupied territory in the grocery aisle. Craig Robinson plays a jive talking box of grits who’s got a problem with crackers. A lot of weak gags, but there’s little story. Just a lot of bickering: “Things get better!” vs. “No they don’t!” As short as it is, I was squirming in my seat for it to be over. If bad words still make you giggle, you’ll be in heaven with this script. If you want witty food-related puns, then go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. There’s a better party than a sausage party ’cause this Sausage Party do stop.
08-11-16
Fast Film Reviews 
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