Sausage Party

In Sausage Party, Seth Rogen, his co-writers and his team of acting friends seem to be trying to one-up Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creative minds behind such adult animation as South Park and Team America: World Police.  They include many of the same elements, such as juvenile humor mixed with social commentary, with equal opportunities to offend just about any race and religion that may be sitting in the audience.  However, Rogen and Company are not the masters that Parker and Stone are, and few of the gags actually work.  They know the words but not the music.  This is a movie that starts out being dumb in kind of a smart way, but ends up being completely dumb by the time it's over.

Consider this example: The movie is set entirely within the confines of a supermarket, where the various ethnic food items are usually at each others throats.  The German food products are depicted as goose stepping Nazis who want to exterminate the "juice" products the next aisle over.  Offensive?  Sure.  But it's not funny, because the movie doesn't go a step further, and actually have something to say about this.  It stops simply at shock value.  Another example: Two of the supporting characters in the film are a Jewish bagel (voiced by Edward Norton, doing a pretty good Woody Allen impression) and a Middle Eastern flatbread (David Krumholtz) who act as adversaries for most of the film, and have to learn to put aside their differences.  However, the movie forgets to give them any real dialogue or things to talk about.  It just relies on stereotypes.  Parker and Stone would know how to dig deep into an idea such as this, and really break it down to its core, making it hilarious.  Here, they trot the characters out and think that's bold enough. 

The movie wants to offend, I get that.  But it's not enough just to have cute CG food characters dropping four letter words every few seconds, and talking about sexual acts.  Sausage Party seems to think that is enough, and I think that's why it disappointed me so much.  Here was a chance to do something really daring, and blow the lid off of adult animation in Hollywood.  Instead, this is a movie that gives us a lesbian food character (a "hard shell" taco voiced by Salma Hayek), and expects us to laugh simply at the idea behind it, instead of giving her anything funny to do or say.  Why not give her something to talk about, or maybe have her dish about her past girlfriends?  Give her some wildly dirty and funny sexual escapades to reflect on.  Just do something!

The heroes of the story are a hot dog named Frank (Rogen) and a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig).  They basically dream of "coming together" by having Frank inserting himself inside Brenda.  In the supermarket where the characters reside, all the food products dream of being picked by the "gods" (aka, shoppers) to go to the Great Beyond, which lies just outside the doors of the store.  No one really knows what the Great Beyond is, other than it's supposed to be a paradise for food.  When a jar of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store after experiencing life outside, he returns with terrible stories of the "gods" slaughtering and eating the food that they take home.  No one believes him at first, but Frank is curious enough to do some investigating of his own, and eventually learns the terrifying truth of what humans really do to food.  He becomes determined to bring all his fellow food together and fight back against the humans.

Given that a lot of recent animated films like to look at the secret lives of everyday objects and animals, Sausage Party could have worked as a savage satire of the Pixar/Dreamworks/Illumination formula.  Instead, the plot simply spins its wheels, never really going anywhere, and getting sidetracked by a pointless subplot concerning a vengeful Douche (Nick Kroll) showing up once in a while to try to kill our heroes.  When it's not doing that, it's wallowing in ethnic stereotypes that it forgets to have anything meaningful to say about.  The movie almost seems smug with itself.  It seems to think its getting away with murder by having its cartoon food items drop the "F-Bomb" 30 times in a minute.  But other than some rather surprising moments during the climax, the film never musters much in the realm of true shock value.  And even then, it just kind of stops when it seems to be getting good.

This is a movie that not only comes across as tedious and tired, but it frequently feels like a missed opportunity.  Seth Rogen and his friends had the chance to really do something great here, but they seem content with merely taking the dumb and rude route, and not really building to anything that resonates.  This may be one of the biggest disappointments of the summer for me, and that's really saying something.

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