Sausage Party

What can I say about Sausage Party? It’s a movie that I had an interest in seeing ever since the trailer came out. The trailer showed a really funny premise with food having personalities and longing for the day that we take them home with us, only to be horrified by the truth that we eat them. To us, what is normal ingestion of sustenance is genocide to the local food you’d find at your grocery store. That’s a funny premise. And it makes sense to portray it as a Rated R comedy with the brains of Seth Rogen behind it.

Now the execution is a lot different than the concept, even when you’re talking about trailers versus the actual movie.

Sausage Party centers around a sausage by the name of Frank (voiced by Seth Rogen) in his package with the rest of the sausages (two of them being his friends voiced by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera), in a grocery store waiting to be chosen by people in order to go to “The Great Beyond”. Frank has a girlfriend who is a hot dog bun named Brenda (voiced by Kristen Wiig) who is waiting to be chosen like Frank.

After a cryptic warning from a jar of Honey Mustard (voiced by Danny McBride) tells them of the horrors in the great beyond, Frank, Brenda, and a whole cast of food related characters go on an adventure to discover the truth of what happens when food leaves the grocery stores and comes home with us.

This adventure takes them through multiple colorful areas of the grocery store, the kitchen of the murderous humans, and culminates in the food trying to find a way to not being eaten. This allows Frank and Brenda to meet a whole cast of characters like Kareem Abdul Lavash (voiced by David Krumholtz) a Middle Eastern Lavash, and Sammy Bagel (voiced by Edward Norton) who is a Jewish Bagel… Get it. Hallah and Kosher foods… get it!

Again, I was overly excited by the trailer of this movie. I thought it was a funny concept and the trailer made me laugh out loud with how absurd this situation is. Furthermore, the funny part about

this film came in all the references made to other films and connecting them to food related puns. For example, at one point a bunch of food is dropped in the aisle. To the humans, they go about their business and just say clean up on aisle 12. But to the food, it is the beaches of Normandy from Saving Private Ryan. Bananas are losing their faces, Peanut butter is trying to scoop up the insides of his wife Jelly. It’s really funny and really well written.

The problem was, I was more entertained by all the silly puns and weird circumstances created by this film more than I was entertained by the characters or their stories. These weren’t characters, they were puns. Frank and Brenda’s entire story is that they want to be chosen so they can be together and he can be inside her… get it?! Abdul and Sammy’s whole deal is their Middle Eastern food feud… get it?! Or the fact that an actual douche (voiced by Nick Kroll… fitting) was trying to kill them… cause he’s a douche… GET IT?!

And I do get it, this is an R-rated comedy about food. They’re not going to have Shakespearian

stories. But I honestly didn’t find anything about these characters that I really liked and therefore it didn’t matter to me if they got eaten or not. I actually thought it was funnier when characters were killed off and not as funny when they weren’t eaten. Now whether or not you think that’s a problem or not is up to you, but the issue comes when I wanted more jokes and instead they were focused on these characters and their drama which I didn’t care about. 

And then there's the humor. If you've seen anything of Seth Rogen's, you know what kind of humor this is going to be and you know what you're getting. If you haven't, watch Pineapple Express and The Interview and I think you'll get a pretty good idea of what Sausage Party is going for. The one difference is, I feel like he went to a whole new level this time. Its probably the fact that the entire movie is animated and Rogen can go to places he's really never been before with animation. But he also goes places I don't think he should have gone... and he goes to a kind of uncomfortable level. I enjoy my raunchy humor, I enjoy some of Seth Rogen's work... but the end of this movie started off funny, got weird, got a little funny weird, and then just got even weirder. 

And putting aside the super weird ending of this movie, humor often goes in ebbs and flows, especially Seth Rogen's humor. Usually, he's pretty good at controlling where the joke ends so it ends on a funny flow instead of a weird ebb, but with Sausage Party, while I was laughing a lot, I couldn't help but feel like a lot of the jokes ended on a weird ebb and I wasn't wild about it. Its not the funniest comedy I've seen in a while and I honestly can't say I have much of an interest to see it again. 

Its not bad, and of course, comedy is a pretty subjective topic to talk about, but in my humble opinion, Sausage Party is good for a shock laugh. Its got a lot of clever jokes, but I didn't have a lot of motivation after seeing this movie to go back and look for those jokes. Sausage Party didn't leave too much of an impression on me and it goes down as just another movie in this lackluster summer we've been having for movies. 

But what did you think of it? What did you think of Sausage Party as a whole? What did you think of that ending? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for movies I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog. 

I'll leave you with this. Like the humor in this movie, the story behind Sausage Party goes in ebbs and flows of being really great and really horrible. Apparently Seth Rogen has been wanting to make this movie for ten years, he's been working on it that long, they got the Oscar winning composer Alan Menken to do the music, they have worked on the animation for so long to make it look good. But at the same time, there are stories of the conditions and payment of animators in this movie being absolutely horrible. Here's a video of Seth Rogen talking about the good parts of the production, just keep in mind, there might be another side to this story. Enjoy!