Movie Review: 'Sausage Party' (Second Opinion)
Read G-funk's review here! Plot: In a supermarket foods of all kinds live in hope that the gods (humans) will honor them by taking them home. A sausage named Frank (Seth Rogen) dreams of the day he and his girlfriend, a hotdog bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig) will be chosen to visit the great beyond. However, the truth is that the gods aren't benevolent, but actually monsters who eat food. This is revealed when Honey Mustard is returned. When Frank and Brenda are separated from their respective packages they end up on a journey to find the truth about the gods they revere. Meanwhile, Frank's friend, a deformed sausage named Barry (Michael Cera), is able to escape the clutches of one of the gods and is determined to return to the supermarket and reveal the truth to his fellow foodstuffs. Review: Sausage Party is a dumpster fire of a film.
Crass, sophomoric, blatantly racist, and utterly without nuance, directors Conrad Vernon and Craig Tiernan's film is an 88 minute exercise in survival. The movie's humor (little that there is) is on the level of an 8th grader whose idea of highbrow comedy rests somewhere between a pie to the face and a kick to the groin. Four different screenwriters, including perpetual man-child Seth Rogen, contributed to this abomination of a script. It's as if the four of them got high and thought of the most offensive and ridiculous circumstances they could think of and then put pen to paper. Or should I say crayon? Seriously, I'm at a loss as to how this movie got made, yet Rendezvous with Rama continues to be in Development Hell.
Probably the most aggravating thing about Sausage Party is the humor falls flat even with such an All-Star cast. Michael Cera, Kristen Wiig, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd, Selma Hayek-you'd think these people would be able to muster a modicum of laughter. Sadly that is not the case. Rather we have an opening song about how the Great Beyond is awesome, where absolutely "nothing shitty" happens and Nick Kroll playing Douche, an ACTUAL douche that seeks revenge on Frank for stopping him from going home with a female patron. Douche may be one of the most annoying characters ever put on the screen. Kroll plays him as a Jersey Shore parody who says "Bro!" every two seconds and gets juiced up with real juice boxes. This is the kind of humor the audience is subjected to, something about as subtle as a ten pound salami to the face.
And the racism. Dear God. Look, I'm not opposed to racist jokes or circumstances in film. Blazing Saddles is a fantastic example of the ridicuolousness of racism. Ditto Archie Bunker and Eric Cartman. However, Sausage Party completely lacks the undertones and satire that those cases exemplify. The whole film contains a plethora of walking stereotypes. Bill Hader plays Firewater a cartoonish Native American, Grits (Craig Robinson) is obviously black, David Krumholtz plays a Middle Eastern lavash named Kareem, and Edward Norton stars as a Sammy Bagel Jr. an obvious Jew doing a very bad Woody Allen impression. How the fuck they got Norton to be in this film boggles the mind. Oh and sauerkraut are all Nazis.
Additionally, Sausage Party puts forth a not so subtle (again subtlety was left on the cutting room floor for this film) pro-science/atheistic viewpoint. Again I am in no way anti-science and I understand that you shouldn't take everything on blind faith. However, Sausage Party implies that anyone who believes in God or some form of religion is delusional at best, a blithering moron at worst. There's no room for debate or discourse here. Either you're a believer and an idiot or you're a person of science and in the right. This essentially puts you on the same level of rationality as the Westboro Baptist Church, unable to listen to opinions other than you're own. Honestly, the term "rational" gets thrown out the window thirty seconds into the movie.
Also the ending. Oy. Two words for you: FOOD ORGY. This five minute scene is one of the most messed up things I've ever seen on the big screen. How Sausage Party didn't get an NC-17 rating is beyond me. I guess it was meant to be funny but merely comes across shocking. Which I guess is what Seth Rogen and company were going for. They just forgot to include the humor. In fact maybe the only redeeming quality about Sausage Party is the animation which is actually quite good.
Without question, Sausage Party is the worst film I've seen in 2016 to date. Tasteless, racist, and above all humorless, the hour and half runtime feels more like three weeks. The writing is lazy as if the screenwriters were dogging it. Yes, there were no wieners here, only losers. Ok I'm done with the puns.
Seriously though, this film is the wurst. (Alright now I'm done.)
My rating: 2/10 You can follow me on Twitter at @DarthGandalf1 and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/flicktasticmovies
