Sausage Party centers on Frank (Seth Rogen), a regular sausage in a pack of ten in a supermarket. All of the food in the supermarket dream of being bought by customers, believing that these consumers are gods who are going to take them to the Promised Land. Trouble starts when a jar of mustard returns from the supposed Promised Land, having seen the truth about what happens to food. He ends up in the same cart with Frank, and this leads into shenanigans that end with Frank and a few other items being left out on the supermarket floor to fend for themselves. And on this adventure, Frank learns the truth about their faith along the way, and makes a real stab at trying to change things.
The movie functions on really juvenile humor, but it uses that to get at something genuinely ambitious. The film is actually a study of faith and religion. It offers the stance that belief is little more panacea, a means of obscuring horrible truths for the benefit of pacifying the masses. The film goes as far as satirizing the Israel-Palestine conflict in its strange, food-centric world. Sausage Party may seem completely crude, and it can certainly be enjoyed in that way. But it is really trying to reach for surprisingly complex ideas.
And this is the real value of the film's approach. Because it all seems so juvenile and ridiculous, it is able to touch on topics that mainstream films aren't usually able to cover. It is so inherently outrageous that it feels completely natural that the movie would want to talk about religion and politics. This is a movie with a Hitler analogue, and in the film's opening song, he sings about wanting to kill all the juice. That is the level at which the film operates. It's silly enough that it can get away with what would otherwise be just horrible ideas.
And to the movie's credit, it takes the craft of the animated film seriously. Apart from the subject matter, this movie could certainly pass as just your average Hollywood computer animated family film. They even bring on Alan Menken to compose the music for the film's opening song. The plot is loose at best, but it really is just there as a framework for the film's jokes and ideas. And the film does overplay some of its humor. It probably invests too much in the villain, which is a literal douche. The film kind of runs that joke into the ground.
But when the film works, it just works. The same impulse to commit to the dumbest of jokes also gives the film its best moments. It embraces the stupidity, and keeps finding new angles to the same dumb joke. An excess of comedic talent in the voice cast certainly helps things along. Seth Rogen is pretty good as the everyman suddenly imbued with purpose. Kristen Wiig ably conveys her character's religious neurosis. There aren't any weak links in this cast, really. Even Nick Kroll, saddled with the one-dimensional villain, makes the most out of his performance.
It would be a bit too much to say that Sausage Party intelligently addresses the issues it takes a stab at. In the end, it really is just a bunch of really dumb food-based jokes strung together, many of them designed mainly to shock and offend. And yet, one can't really call the movie as a whole dumb. There is real thought put into the deployment of its obscenities, and all that thought emerges as purpose. But put that all aside, because in the end, the movie is just funny. Everything else is just a bonus.
My Rating:
