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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
