Entirely Without Subtlety

Rating: 6/10 (20 September 2016)

Imagine a crude and explicit version of Toy Story, but swap the toys for food, and you've got Sausage Party in a nutshell. Frank the sausage and Brenda the bun can't wait to get picked up off the shelf, taken home, and shoved inside one another in the most sexual fashion. Like most foodstuffs of this particular supermarket, they believe that the gods (read as: us) live in a place of paradise just beyond the automatic doors, and they come in every day to select the lucky individuals to liberate. Of course the reality is that they get cut, cooked, eaten, and thrown away, but the hope of a better afterlife is enough to keep the store's atmosphere bright and hopeful for it's many denizens. It's a world that's promptly shattered when an item is returned ranting and raving about the horrors he's seen, and a suicide leads to Frank and Brenda out of their packages and alone on the shop floor.
Being a Seth Rogen movie, you simply cannot be surprised at the sheer depravity of crude this movie devolves into, but I kind of was. There's no sugar-coating here, and not an awful lot of subtext either. When they mean sex, they say it and describe it in the most over-the-top, innuendo way. I mean if the whole concept of a sausage wanting to insert himself into a bun for pleasure doesn't clue you in to the depths this movie will go, nothing will.
With what freedoms the animators were accorded due to the characters all being food, there are some pretty graphic sequences. Even when it doesn't use innuendo or metaphor, it doesn't hold back. Banana's have their faces peeled off, sausages are sliced in half, carrots are eaten alive, cans of spaghetti have their 'guts' spilling out over the floor, and there is a literal bloody eyeball rolling around. I can handle my gore, and while this wasn't exactly gory, it still hit me as a little disturbing.
While it's far from subtle in it's approach to just about everything, Sausage Party isn't all shock and explicitness. While I wouldn't go so far as to call it a clever movie, it does have it's moments of wit. A big theme of the movie is religion. The foodstuffs worship the gods that pick them and take them to 'The Great Beyond' and when met with the realisation that all is not what they imagined, they deny it and carry on in ignorance. It's like a Christian being shown proof of Evolution. All the same arguments are there. There's also a great exchange between a hebrew bagel and a Muslim lavash who have found themselves sharing an aisle. They're asked if they could just share it; it's big enough, and they just look at each other and laugh. Palestine in a nutshell. There's also the sourkraut who want to wipe out the juice, and a group of non- perishables (one native American) who sit around a marshmallow fire smoking weed from a kazoo.
These religiously tinged jokes were probably the ones I found the funniest (plus the toilet roll). But a lot of the jokes are typical Seth Rogen affair, relying maybe a little too much on crass sexuality and language to appeal to your inner teenage boy. Hurr hurr the sausage looks like a penis, so lets put it inside a vaginal-looking bun, and dangle it between a human's legs. Hurr hurr, douche's clean out vaginas, so lets make this douche (played, humorously, by Parks and Rec's own The Douche) obsessed with cameltoes and putting himself in holes.
I like a good Seth Rogen movie every now and then, and I figured Sausage Party had enough of an original concept to mark it with some of his best. Unfortunately it just tried too hard. It went too far with the freedom and pressure a cartoon offers for an adult audience. I'm sure they had a lot of fun making cute little carrots swear, or imagining what sexual intercourse between a taco and a bun would look like (spoiler: they use a sausage as a strap-on), but for me I feel they could've concentrated a little more on the satirical element built-in rather than falling back on the same dick and stoner jokes Rogen's movies are always rife with. A very adult and graphic cartoon about food is a fresh idea, but the jokes that flesh it out are the same jokes we've heard a million times before. It did get a few audible laughs out of me though, so it's not a complete failure. I give Sausage Party an above average 6/10. Would I watch it again? No, probably not. Maybe I'm more of a prude than I thought?!