Sausage Party

I will never look at food in the same way again…just not sure if that’s because I’m now disgusted by what food apparently does while I’m away, or because I secretly hate myself for murdering countless citizens of the pizza community over the years…

From the clearly fucked up minds of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Sausage Party takes us into the world of food, more specifically, a Supermarket called Shopwell’s, where we follow a sausage named Frank (Seth Rogen), and his girlfriend, a literal bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig), on their quest to finally bang each other (no joke). With Fourth of July right around the corner, this is Frank and Brenda’s best chance at getting chosen by the “gods”, aka humans, and brought back to their homes where they’ll be released from their oppressive plastic packaging and be able to finally have some sausage inside bun contact, hold the mustard. Little do any of our friendly foods know that being chosen and taken into the “The Great Beyond” isn’t all peaches and cream, in fact, being chosen might mean something worse, something so pearable that it will change the way the denizens of Shopwell’s forever look at what it means to be “chosen”. What a pickle indeed!

Like Toy Story, and more recently, The Secret Life of Pets before it, Sausage Party takes the “peeking into a world that comes to life after we aren’t around” idea and runs with it to places that aren’t even on the menu. An example: there are literal food orgies. Another: bath salts make an appearance. Let your mind figure out where that one goes. Now if either of these examples aren’t your cup of noodles, then this movie really isn’t for you, but if so, know that you won’t be disappointed, especially if your sense of humor falls into the childishly immature category like mine.

Not since the South Park movie and Team America: World Police has a film come along so offensive, so disgustingly raunchy, so bat-shit crazy as this, and like those two films, Sausage Party is so damn funny that its hard not to like at least some of what’s happening here. The jokes are fast and hilarious and hit more than miss, the puns are terrible and cheap but clever enough to make you chuckle, the characters are off their respective rockers but are likeable enough to get attached to, and most of all, the film actually attempts to inject some interesting social commentary regarding religion and prejudice that’s deftly handled with a sense of respect that surprised me.

Of course those topics are tossed through the wringer in terms of being made fun of at first, but when you consider that this movie is essentially a weirdly packaged sex comedy, it’s great to see that the filmmakers had something to say about the current state of the world regardless. For example, there are two characters, a bagel named Sammy (Edward Norton) and a lavash named Kareem Abdul (David Krumholtz), that are clearly representing the warring sides of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. They bitch and complain about the “aisle” space that they share and straight up hate each other merely out of principal (wait until you see the resolution to that conflict). Then you have the fact that food believe us to be gods and that “The Great Beyond” is essentially heaven, and the script’s thinly veiled play on what religion means to people becomes something a lot smarter than what I had expected heading in. On an intellectual level this movie doesn’t dig deep, but when it makes the attempt to at least bring that extra seasoning to the dinner table, I can’t help but applaud. Add a healthy dash of surface layer emotion, and you have yourself a film that pleases on more levels than a typical comedy, let alone an animated one.

The only problems this movie really suffers from are minimal, but when said problems involve a handful of scenes that are mediocre at best and are glaringly obvious whenever there’s a lull in the story or comedy, it’s hard to say that this film is firing on all cylinders. From time to time the story drags a bit, mostly due to the fact that the script follows so many characters with so many plot threads that it ends up making the pacing and overall story structure feel a bit jumbled and overstuffed, but there’s enough going on around those scenes to let these little nitpicks slide. Other than that, the main villain, in the form of a literal douche named Douche (Nick Kroll), is hilarious at first, but his “bro” characterization wears thin about halfway through, but I guess that’s the point the script was trying to make with that character anyway, so good for them.

Offensive on levels I didn’t even know eggxisted, Sausage Party is the most fun I’ve had watching a comedy in a long time. Nothing is off limits and everything is cranked up so past eleven that I had no idea what the filmmakers were going to pull out of their sack of potatoes next. This film is a must see for anyone who wants to be equally insulted as they are rolling on the floor laughing in stitches.