a full course meal of a very dangerous comedy!

Rating: 8/10 (12 August 2016)

Some of you may be too young to remember (or maybe too old, who knows), but once upon a time a man named Ralph Bakshi made hard-R rated animation that was decidedly not meant for simply for families to gobble up, so at the same time Disney put out something like Robin Hood, he had Heavy Traffic, which was an semi-autobiographical, "X-rated" look at life in Brooklyn with all the rough edges showing, or in 1975 (his masterpiece to me) Coonskin, which took off from Song of the South to make a scathing satire on race using black caricatures, blaxploitation and other characters like a naked woman with red-white-and-blue body paint. But of course times have changed and now animation is practically never even made much less released at a wide scale (when was the last time, South Park, maybe, or by extension Team America). So, with this in mind, and ironic to say given the subject matter, but thank God for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg for Sausage Party.
Is it a perfect movie? No, but who the f*** cares? This is one of the smarter films of the summer, if not the year, and surprising in that it delivers one thing in its marketing - a parody of all of these talking-whatever movies (you know from Pixar, "when the lights go out X is actually alive and talking, and there's an adventure story where one or two characters get separated and have to find their way back etc etc") and with the kind of "explicit" language that Rogen-Goldeberg and company have put out there since Superbad nine years ago. However if you see the movie it delivers something deeper, subverting expectations that come with something that looks so goofy (the film's directors have credits ranging from Monsters vs Aliens, with Rogen did a voice for by the way, and Thomas the Tank Engine videos!) but is about... religion and the power and susceptibility of beings towards faith.
That may sound like blowing hot air like, how can this be anything more than its surface-level crude comedy and stereotypes? But right from the on-set, where the characters refer to the "Gods" and the opening song (the only main one so it's not a musical) where it's all about praising the Gods and the "Great Beyond" which is, of course, the Great Lie of being chosen by humans to be taken away as what they're meant for, the writers of the film take an opportunity and don't settle only for the gross-out... this is not to say this is not a filthy, raucous, ludicrous film that includes such things as, well, bath salts that make people hallucinate to the point where they can SEE THE FOOD TALKING (is that what they do, I wouldn't know, haven't tried it, sorry), and stereotypes of every thing you can think of from Irish potatoes to a Jewish bagel and a Muslim falafel and a Mexican (Lesbian!) taco to a Firewater Native American alcohol can (and Craig Robinson... well, see the movie to know about that).
Because, yes, they're here in spades! What makes Sausage Party impactful is that it takes a leap to be *about* something, even if it ends up being rather gruesome and very, horrifically, violent (yes, for an R-rated movie this is one of the more violent pieces of escapism - perhaps in its way more honest than something like a PG-13 Suicide Squad despite/because of things like decapitated heads or exploding organs and so on). It even has a point about what it means to be an inspiration to people, that to change minds you can't simply show the "truth" right away and that different factions can't process that information. If that sounds odd, well, this climax is especially odd and totally insane. But it's also a brilliant conclusion to a very good movie, full of balls-to-the-wall action and a don't-take-no-prisoners attitude towards the food vs the humans. It reaches Inglourious Basterds level catharsis.
Again, it's not totally up there with This is the End or Pineapple Express, the landmarks for this duo and their collaborators. On a first watch the Jew/Arab duo were a little one-note as a joke (so are a lot of the characters, which are fine, but these are here for longer period), and it also didn't make sense completely what could or couldn't talk (i.e. why the food AND things like a d**che or toilet paper or so on, what about the shopping cart or a television, where's the line drawn?) But these are relatively minor complaints in a movie that gets by by being so harrowingly hysterical in how it delivers its comedy - these guys have the opposite of fear, which is what you need for comedy. They have confidence in their vulgarity, so who cares if it has like 400 f***s? It has zero of them to give! Add on impressive voice-work (Edward Norton as the bagel! And James Franco gives one of his best performances in a while as "Druggie") and you got yourself a winner, and a fine successor to people who used animation as a mechanism for delivering hardcore, drag-through-the-mud satire like Bakshi or Mike Judge.