Sausage Party: Quick Review

I’m not sure what I was expecting.

So full disclosure, I don’t really like Seth Rogan’s sense of humor. That being said, I do find him funny at times. Superbad doesn’t hold up, but Knocked Up sure does. This Is The End is a modern classic, and The Interview wasn’t that bad. So when he’s right, he’s right. 

Sausage Party is when he’s not right. So the joke is pretty much summed up in the trailer. Food is sentient ala Toy Story/Pixar stuff, and isn’t aware of the horrible truth that the humans who they worship are actually taking them out of their home of a supermarket to take them home and eat them. A sausage named Frank learns this truth, and is on a mission to end the suffering of all food.

The unfortunate thing about Sausage Party was that it just wasn’t funny. Yet, being in a crowded theater, I heard almost the entire audience burst out laughing with every joke. I’m someone who can turn his brain off and watch hours of modern Family Guy, Mr. Meaty, Drawn Together; I’m used to raunchy humor. But where Sausage Party failed, at least for me, was how almost all of its gags were lost on me because I’ve already seen them before, and done better. A joke who’s punchline is “look at how fucked up this stereotype is?” sorry, Family Guy beat you to it, and made me feel more uncomfortable. A joke about how Palestine and Israel don’t get along? Sorry, The Drawn Together Movie beat you to that one. It was all just so predictable. On top of that, almost the entire script is bad food puns. It was funny as first. I appreciate a good pun (even a bad one at times) but the bad puns just kept coming. It was honestly overwhelming. Then there was the nonstop profanity, which got laughs for pretty much no reason. There were entire jokes where the punchline was “fuck off ___” followed by a character’s name. No pun, no punchline, just an insult. That got tons of laughs. 

The only place where Sausage Party succeed is the few moments were everything just goes above and beyond to gross you out. Once again, I really saw all this before, but on the occasion where it was unique (that ending was pretty fucking wild) it was shocking enough to garner a chuckle, but not much else.

I will mention one last thing: the subtext of this movie is heavily rooted in a meta-narrative of atheism. No seriously. The plot is more or less a man’s journey to find proof of an afterlife to justify harsh rules and strict behavior, and ends up deciding that he doesn’t need any of that. I’ve seen critics compare this to South Park, and while I can see why they made that comparison, South Park at least had the decency to be funny while being a story I can follow. 

Sausage Party fails hard. It’s not really funny, it’s not all that shocking, and it’s just a lame attempt at making one joke stretch on for almost 2 hours.

4/10