Went to see an early Thursday showing Sausage Party, Seth Rogan’s new deeply R rated animated comedy about talking food. I am a bad person for seeing it… and a worse person for laughing as much as I did. The word raunchy isn’t accurate enough for this movie – it’s wrong. It’s dirty. It’s vulgar. It’s racist (or has a lot of racial stereotypes). It’s full of swear words every other second, it’s a stoner comedy, and it has a food orgy so amazing and so wrong that you’ll marvel this didn’t confuse the suits at the MPAA (“it’s animated! They’re food! Yet I haven’t seen those kinds of sex acts anywhere, much less in actual pornography. But it’s food! “).
So the premise is that food in a supermarket think of us as Gods and when we buy them, they think are are chosen and will ascend to the afterlife outside of the store. They don’t realize they will be brutally murdered and eaten. Our hero, a hot dog named Frank (har!) played by Rogan must survive falling out of his package (with his hot dog bun lady love) before being taken to the promised land. He must travel the supermarket and learn the horrible truth about reality. He must also avoid the clutches of an angry dude-bro douchebag villain who is a literal douche.
As I may have noted, it’s a strong rated R comedy with more curse words than almost anything I’ve seen… and its raunchy and dirty…. maybe even moreso than Rogan’s own This is the End (which was pretty filthy and funny). But I laughed reasonably often and I laughed hard on a number of occasions – sometimes it was over an actually good joke or sequence and sometimes it was just at the audacity of the joke they just pulled off. It’s funny because it’s so wrong, type humor. The only problem is that it’s non consistently funny and it does start to drag in parts. It does have to tell it story and things kind of get dragged down by that.
Frankly, this movie is an equal opportunity offender. There’s a talking bagel who is a jew and a lavash who is Muslim and they bicker constantly over shelf space. There’s drunken Mexican tequila, a native american bottle of Firewater, a package of grits who is pissed off at all these crackers on his shelf, and so much more. I guess what you get out of this will depend on your tolerance for offensive stereotypes as humor. I suspect, given how the movie plays out, they had a point to doing some of this comedy. Because the movie has more going on that just bad punch and raunchy humor..
Surprisingly, the movie has a theme. It wants to talk about religion and belief and disbelief. That the way atheists and theists talk over each other isn’t helpful to either side of the debate. Because what else can it mean that the hot dog learns that there is no afterlife… and that he needs to tell the other food the terrible truth. Surprise message in your dirty food sex movie!
So you already know if there’s any chance in hell you’ll see this flick. If the trailers didn’t sell you or scare you, take my word that it’s even filthier and raunchier than you had any right to guess. But it’s also has a curious intelligence in that surprise message/theme. Not sure that’s enough to counterbalance the raunchy if you aren’t into that. But I laughed… not often enough but really hard and I’m not a better person for it, I suspect.
Score: 84