Sunday 18 September 2016

Sausage Party (2016) – A Review


It’s unsurprising that many cinemagoers have had high hopes for Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan’s Sausage Party. If nothing else, it represents the antithesis to what we’ve come to expect from mainstream animation. With music by prolific award-winning composer Alan Menken, and a screenplay co-written by Seth Rogen, Sausage Party promises to be an adult parody of your average Disney/Pixar flick, filled to the brim with all the ingredients one would never normally use to make an animated feature film. Unfortunately, though, one can’t help but feel as though it’s a bit undercooked.
Columbia Pictures, 2016
The movie opens at Shopwell’s, a supermarket, where all the anthropomorphised food and grocery items dream of being taken to ‘the Great Beyond’ – a utopian world in which shoppers are perceived to be gods who take them in. Frank, a sausage voiced by Seth Rogen, fantasises about living in this realm with his hot dog bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig). However, after having been chosen for purchase by a shopper, their dreams are shattered by the revelation – courtesy of a tortured returned Honey Mustard jar – that the Great Beyond is not what they’ve been led to believe. An accident leads to the characters’ being flung out of the shopping cart, scrambling for freedom. In addition, an aggressive douche, named… well, Douche, breaks his nozzle in the collision and vows revenge against Frank. It’s up to Frank, Brenda, their ‘deformed’ sausage friend Barry (cue the inevitable penis jokes) and their other foodstuff friends to find out the truth about their existence and save themselves from being chopped, ground, drunk and boiled alive.
Columbia Pictures, 2016
As you can probably tell, Sausage Party is not a movie that should be taken seriously. It’s a difficult film to review, in the sense that it obviously is not going to be to everybody’s tastes, but it ultimately achieves what it sets out to do. It’s irreverent, insulting, vulgar and crass, but that’s kind of the point. Naturally, I have some personal quibbles, mostly revolving around the overuse of vulgar humour, the unnecessarily strong language throughout, and its strong sex and drug references. But while it does go a little too far at times, this conversely represents the film’s main appeal for many others, and so I can’t really criticise what I personally find distasteful, as this film, from its opening scenes to its end credits, is nothing but distasteful, and it’s fully aware of that fact. What I can say is that there is nothing overly surprising about this film – at least in terms of its comedy. Some of its puns are fairly clever, but it relies far too heavily on f-bombs and sex jokes to maintain its humour. This criticism may sound contradictory based on my previous comment, but the problem isn’t really related to its crudity; the problem relates to the fact that the prolific use of such vulgarity is simply not funny. Evidently, this is geared predominantly to an audience who finds the mere concept of penises and sex hilarious.

What is surprising about the movie, however, is how thematically profound it turns out to be. Penis jokes and f-bombs aside, Sausage Party provides a relevant social commentary on the impact and hypocrisy of religion and an all-too-familiar misguided belief system. That said, it’s not strictly atheistic – rather, it seems to condemn organised religion but indicate that higher powers do exist, just not in the form the foods anticipated. Beyond that, its message gets a little muddled, mired in its excessive vulgarity and overindulgence in phallic and sexualised imagery. And that’s fine – first and foremost it’s an adult comedy and whatever message it attempts to convey is likely of little concern to its target audience. All the same, while arguably underdeveloped, it is somewhat refreshing to find that the movie bears far more substance than you might initially expect.
Columbia Pictures, 2016
Ultimately though, the sophistication stops dead there, and there’s little else to get your teeth into, so to speak. It otherwise relies on some very clichéd ‘tropes’ to maintain its status as an ‘adult comedy’. In fact, it pretty much ticks every item on the checklist. Bad language? Yep. Racism? You got it. Copious amounts of sex? Absolutely. That’s not to mention the allusions to drug use throughout the film, which involve the grocery items standing around ‘getting baked’. Now, I’m not saying subversive humour doesn’t work. Sure it does – but only when it’s done well. And sadly much of the actual comedy is lost because it tries too hard to defy our expectations of what an animated film should represent. Again, for many people this is the point of the film, but while such a movie is something of a rarity, it’s been done plenty of times before, and it’s no longer a spectacle. And let’s face it, likening a sausage to a penis is hardly an original idea.

Overall, it’s difficult to summarise one’s thoughts on the movie. As stated previously, it’s crude, vulgar, and offensive, and in that sense it fulfils its purpose. But beyond that, it’s a baffling concoction of obscenity and sophistication that fails to satisfactorily deliver the latter because of its rather tiresome infatuation with the former. There are some mildly amusing scenes, but coarseness alone, even while presented incongruously within the abstract confines of an animation, is not a funny concept. Even so, its condemnation of religion, while unoriginal, bears some merit for being thought-provoking even if the message it attempts to convey is somewhat half-baked. In all, if subversive humour is your tipple, there’s a chance it might be to your taste, but for the more refined cinemagoer, it just barely provides ample food for thought.

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