Sausage Party, the first R-rated CG animated movie, is about one sausage leading a group of supermarket products on a quest to discover the truth about their existence and what really happens when...
With a deliberately inappropriate name, Sausage Party is about food items from a supermarket wanting to be purchased and taken home...only to find out that we eat them, and so they most warn others of this revelation. This was heavily marketed as inappropriate, offensive and ridiculously funny...heck even critics have rated this highly, so it must be all three right? Wrong. It's definitely inappropriate and offensive, but funny? Hardly. Let me start off with the good points, the voice acting is great with many comedic hollywood actors being involved (particular praise to Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen) and it brought bit of life to the characters. The animation was ok, nothing spectacular but it did the job for the most part, it did look bit clumsy and unfinished in certain scenes. Right, now for the negative aspects. Oh my word this film is offensive! It has everything from racial stereotypes, religious backlash, extreme profanity (as extreme as food profanity can get), a ridiculous amount of innuendos and to top it all off, encouraging drug use. Now I might be pushing it with the last part but seriously when a script is so forced to be offensive in every line, it grows tiresome after the first 5 minutes and this is where the problem lies. With an 89 minute runtime the 'jokes' become old fast and with thinly written characters it just means its extremely difficult to care for them and the story as a whole. The last 15 minutes of the film was actually funny and enjoyable (not to mention it has scarred me for life, if you've seen it then you know what I mean) but at that stage I just didn't care for it. The film would've benefitted from some clever dialogue...where were the puns? Instead all we got was sex jokes and racial stereotypes from food items, because apparently we all laugh at Salma Hayek voicing a taco because she's Mexican or noodles impersonating Japanese people. I see what they were attempting to do, portraying the supermarket as a smaller scale version of the world and the different cultures, but it was just plain offensive and completely misused. Then there was one scene attempting the whole "religion is just belief as there is no proof that God exists"...it got under my skin, the screenwriters weren't even trying to hide what they were doing, they might as well have got the food items to say "science beats religion!". The last 5 minutes of the film sealed its fate, what was the point!? What would they have gained by revealing what they did? Apart from the potential of a sequel (please...no no, don't even!). Alright...I'm calm, I'm done. Overall, Sausage Party had the potential to be offensive and witty but instead chose to use racial stereotypes, extreme profanity and innuendos in attempt to gain laughs from this borefest. I shan't be watching it again.
