Well hello there, children.
Yes it’s me, The Frog, I’ve returned with another choice morsel of film-style reviewage.
What did I lay mine eyes upon this fine week?
Dear Christ in Heaven
Yes. I saw….
Sausage Party.
With my eyes.
I hope you’re fucking happy.
Where to start with this one? Oh yeah, the joke. Singular.
“Food is TALKING”
It sure is. And the food talks for the whole film…. and that is literally it.
Well, not quite.
The food also curses. Like, SO MUCH. The food says “Fuck” and “Shit” and “Dick” and “Cunt” and all those other inherently funny words. I mean, it practically writes itself!
The food is also resoundingly, unnervingly racist.
Let’s crack on, shall we?
Sausage Party stars Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and that entire gang as various foodstuffs – sausages, buns, mustards, relishes of all kinds, sauces, spirits, biscuits, crackers that are both sentient as a box of crackers and also contain individually sentient crackers, a tube of mints that is alive aswell as the mints inside of him…
…
What I’m saying is, the “world rules” here don’t really exist per se, or at least are given no thought whatsoever. I thought to myself at one point “But if the packaging is alive for that product, why isn’t the packaging alive for the other…. nevermind”. Just don’t ask. Got it?
The film opens with a supermarket full of foodstuffs greeting a new day with glee as they hope they will be chosen by the “Gods” AKA hoomans like you and I. Their belief in the “Great Beyond” is given voice by an over-the-top musical number co-written by none other than Alan fucking Menken.
You know him.
Frank (Rogen) and Brenda (Wiig) are a bun and sossy in love, and they are excited to be united (in the sexual sense because of course) if and when they are picked up by a benevolent God.
Of course, everything goes tits up as the food realises the true nature of “The Beyond” and Frank must go on an epic quest to warn the yada yada yada.
But first we get the following :
Nazi Mustard (that wants to eliminate JUICE , GET IT ? HAHA HOLOCAUST SO FUNNY)
Gay Fruits
Conservative Nuts
Native American “Fire Water”
Drunken Thief Mexican Tequila
Offensive black stereotype Grits
Sultry Mexican Taco-Lesbian
Buck-toothed Japanese Soy Sauce
Turban-sporting Indian Curry Sauce
and of course…
Note : This is what watching the film feels like.
an oul OIRISH Potato-tee-ta-toe-ta-tee-to.
If you thought the above was bad, it gets worse. SO MUCH WORSE.
Also included as two MAIN CHARACTERS …. ( I can’t even type this)…
A Palestinian Flatbread …. and a Jewish Bagel. Called Sammy Bagel Jr. Voiced…. by Edward fucking Norton. Doing an impression of everyone’s favourite alleged rapist.
No. Not Bill Cosby. The other one.
No, not that one, either.
Anyway, here they both are.
Good Gentle Jesus.
Of course, these two foodstuffs hate each other because they are fighting over aisle space.
Read that again. I’ll wait.
Yes, the film makes the Israel-Palestine conflict a source of pants-wetting “humour” throughout it’s runtime.
Hilarious.
As the film progresses, Frank’s other frankfurter friend Barry (voiced by Michael Cera) must make a journey back from the home of a human to the superstore he came from, with many gross-out, nasty jokes along the way. He meets both a roll of toilet paper and a condom (used, because fuck subtlety right?) that both have the same joke, but they just couldn’t choose one, could they? He then meets a human strung out on bath salts who can now see/hear the food for what they actually are, before he is rescued by Stephen Hawking in Chewing Gum Form.
Somehow, that is not a typo.
Sadly, the film gets serious notions as it winds down, with Frank confronting his fellow foods (and girlfriend Brenda) about their “beliefs” when he finds “evidence” that “contradicts” their “inherently held ALRIGHT I GET IT.
The film about TALKING WIENERS becomes a diatribe, an ironically preachy atheistic mess where having religious beliefs is synonymous with stupidity and avoidance of reality, and I found it trite, insulting and terribly written. And I’m an atheist.
It ends the only wait it can – with a hedonistic inter-food-species orgy where the Israeli-Palestine conflict is resolved when they teabag each other.
….
Seriously.
Seriously.
Seriously, that happens.
Also, did I mention that the villain of the film is roided-up douche?
Literally?
As in, he’s a feminine hygiene product that forcibly rapes and murders other characters in order to make himself stronger?
Pictured : Comedy
Are you laughing yet?
Are you?
If so, go to a fucking doctor and get your head examined.
FUCK ME , this film is an alarmingly racist piece of garbage.
It is also painfully, painfully, almost pathetically unfunny. Not one joke lands. Not one.
I saw this film with about 6 other people, and only one guy in the cinema laughed. Like, at all. He had a really annoying laugh. So annoying that I think the rest of us became concerned for him over the course of the film. I think he might need a long chat with another human. Guy’s got issues, clearly.
If you’re out there, Strange Cackling Man, let us know in the comments if you were as high as the writers of this film obviously were.
That’s the only logical conclusion I can draw.
Avoid.
Frog out.
unshavedmouse 
Oh sweet baharat, they resurrected Food Fight.
*eye twitches*
I’ve actually heard it was a pretty good film and clever with its commentary about religion and some have even stated its the movie Foodfight was trying to be but failed. I haven’t seen it but I’ve heard people who were expecting it to be dogshit actually came out being positive about it and I’m glad a modern R rated animated movie was successful as maybe this will at least broaden the spectrum regarding animation.
Mouse, go to your happy place.
Next, send help for J-Man because I think he’s lost it.
If Sausage Party does lead to amazing R-rated animation, it will be akin to how we got Citizen Kane and The Lion King from Birth of a Nation.
It’s almost worth watching Sausage Party as instruction. Almost.
I seriously wonder which one is worse
I haven’t seen this one, but Foodfight is worse.
Yeah, I just went back and re-read your Foodfight review. Don’t think it’s possible to be worse than that.
Foodfight IS worse.
Sausage Party is at least, for want of a better phrase, “self aware”. In that it knows exactly what it is trying to be, is being that as hard as possible, and if you want that in a movie, you got it. If it’s not “good”, it is at least “competent”. I have no doubt this matches Rogen’s vision 100%.
Whereas Foodfight is pure ineptitude from beginning to end. I have no idea what it thinks it’s doing, but I’m positive it failed.
It’s trying to be Toy Story.
Curse you! *I* was going to make the Foodfight reference!
Man, the trailers for this looked pretty good but I don’t think I’ve heard one positive thing said about it.
Antagony and Ecstasy seemed to think it exceeded expectations… low as they were.
Even if I wanted to see it, which I do even less after this review, I wouldn’t go now after it emerged how shittily they treated their animators.
Say what you will about Sausage Party, but can we at least take a moment to appreciate the fact that AN ORIGINAL, R-RATED, ANIMATED MOVIE became a box-office success in the United States? That is as extremely rare thing. The last movie like that was Heavy Metal, in 1981 (yes, there was the South Park movie in 1999, but that was based on a TV show).
Honestly I’m not really that surprised given how popular stuff like South Park and Family Guy are, as well as some of the stuff on Adult Swim.
Well, that’s television. There still seems to be this expectation that animated MOVIES, as opposed to TV, are supposed to be kid-friendly. Even after animated TV series aimed at adults became popular, animated movies continued to be produced almost exclusively for children and families. There was The Simpsons Movie, admittedly, but a lot of kids saw that one so it hardly counts. That’s where Sausage Party is different. It’s the first successful adult animated movie in over 35 years to not be based on an existing property–in other words, the first to be sold simply by its own merits as a movie rather than for a built-in fanbase.
If anything, this proves that there is in fact a market for original adult animated movies. Now all someone has to do is make them.
Even worse: they ruined the one (utterly unoriginal) joke in the whole thing, by having Meat Loaf play meatloaf.
I liked it. I think the point of having a lot of ridiculous stereotyped talking food was to show how ridiculous all those stereotypes are, and how religion has been wrongly used as a reason to hate since the beginning of time. I can understand how people who are religious would find it offensive.
No mention of controversy surrounding this? Apparently, the animators were horribly mistreated.
http://www.slashfilm.com/sausage-party-animators-controversy
I think the thing that annoys me is that this film borders on being genuinely witty at times, but almost always falls back on crass offensive humour that’s there for the sake of it. Maybe pre-Southpark and all the other raunchy cartoons on TV hearing cartoon characters swear would’ve been shocking, but after all these years, the novelty has worn off. I know it’s somewhat new to have an original animated film like this, but it honestly comes across more as an extended sketch than anything else. I hope that the success of this film will at least result in some better adult animated movies, that would make my foolish decision to buy a ticket worth it. Oh, and the controversy with the animators sucks, and left a bad TASTE (ba dum tish) in the mouth especially during that self-congratulatory meta-ending. I hope they can find some better studios and projects in the future.
This is why reading reviews sometimes really is nessecary. This kind of seemed interesting based on the trailer and RottenTomato score and some comments seemed good too. Then I heard about the racisim and rape jokes and the first atheistic and hedonistic preaching. Btw nice that you can see as an atheist that atheistic preaching is not so kind of positive. This should not really be nessecary to mention and I kind of did not want bring that up, but, I mean it seems kind of rare most of the time even when all other preaching is viewed negatively so…
I really did not get the appeal of the trailer so it’s not surprising that the “joke” of animated swearing doesn’t work. Excellent review, btw. Far more entertaining than I’m guessing the film was.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention how Sausage Party’s animators got royally fucked over. I mean, forcing your animators to work overtime without pay is a REALLY douche move.