A little late to the party, but we finally got around to posting our review of the raunchy animated film from the guys that brought you Pineapple Express and This is the End.
If you are one of the few filmgoers holding out on seeing this film, don’t feel bad. Having finally gotten around to seeing this film myself, Sausage Party (even though they are technically hotdogs) stood out as being a film worth the wait. And for that, I was sorely mistaken.
Look, Seth Rogen and Company are funny. Sure, pot and dick jokes come with the territory if any of the usual cast mates are associated to a film, and naturally putting them all together brings a lot of both. But even if you find that hilarious or not, I have to be frank and say that Sausage Party really just did not make me laugh. Not once.
In an attempt to parody Pixar and DreamWorks’ long-running battle for an artsy, family-unifying feel good film experience, Seth Rogen and his crew have put together a film that attempts to poke fun at each and every cliche you would expect from a CGI animated film in 2016. The unfortunate part is, the idea of the film, if explaining to a friend or co-worker, is far funnier than what is executed on screen.
The premise follows a band of hotdogs and buns, among other various foods, who believe that once they are taken from the supermarket by human-Gods, are brought into the “Great Beyond”, an endless eternity of paradise, peace, and fornication. Yes, this movie’s theme is largely surrounded by religious undertones (and overtones) that mock saving one’s virginity until a unification under God. In reality, all food in the supermarket is sexually repressed and all they really want to do is f*ck the hell out of each other until they pass out. Which does actually happen in a major food-on-food orgy. And of course, Seth Rogen’s hotdog character smokes a copious amount of pot while sitting around a few racial stereotypes hating on “crackers”.
“The film tries too hard to garner cheap laughs, and completely forgets that it is trying to be a parody”
Sure, the film is a parody and the premise above does sound hilarious. But the issue is that your imagination, if you have not seen Sausage Party, runs wild with an ideology that brings together hilarious bits of literal food porn and drug jokes, whereas the film itself is so derivative and so foul, that nearly fifteen minutes in, you just want them to ease up on the cussing or simply count how many times a hotdog yells “f*ck” every minute that follows, just to keep you entertained, which is sad because the movie simply does not do that. At all.
If you want a firm grasp on what Sausage Party is all about, without paying the theater ticket price, just replay the Red Band trailer 45 times right in a row.
Sausage Party’s biggest problem is that it sort of gives off the vibe that Rogen and Jonah Hill got high with some of their friends and came up with this idea that food was alive a la Toy Story, and had to overcome the obstacles of surviving these horrible human monsters that wanted to eat them. Yes, it sounds funny. And yes, I personally would have LOVED to have been in the room during this conversation, because it does sound hilarious. But what went wrong here? The film tries too hard to garner cheap laughs, and completely forgets that it is trying to be a parody, ultimately losing its place in understanding what that fundamentally means; make fun of this generation’s animated films.
What I am saying is, the best part about Sausage Party is the trailers, because at least those leave the rest of the film up to your imagination where you might think of some funny moments that make you laugh out loud, because Sausage Party literally did not make me laugh out loud one time. Which is a shame for those in the theater audience, except for the one guy who laughed slightly for a moment at a joke about masturbation.
Sausage Party is in theates now and stars Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, Nick Kroll, David Krumholtz, Edward Norton, Salma Hayek.
