Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s raunchy animated feature “Sausage Party” certainly doesn’t lack audaciousness when it comes to pushing technical boundaries. While it’s not the first of its kind in terms of feature length animated films with adult humor, it is the first to utilize the size and scope of Dreamworks and Pixar’s three-dimensional style. Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon both come from animation backgrounds, and that certainly helps to facilitate Rogen and Goldberg’s vision of a colorful grocery store where food items learn the harsh realities of their place in the circle of life. The ambition of this project is impossible to ignore, and with an over-saturation of talking animal cartoons released every year, a parody was ripe for the making. That is why “Sausage Party” feels like even more of a deflating as missed opportunity. This creative team could have really done something spectacular and sharp, but the film lacks both subtlety and wit and leans on lowest common denominator gags and empty vulgarity.
Rogen voices Frank, a hot dog who is looking forward to being chosen by one of the human “gods” so that he may finally copulate with a bun named Brenda (Kristin Wiig), his across-the-shelf girlfriend. When they finally make it into a shopping cart, an accident separates Frank from his package of hotdog friends voiced by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. Frank and Brenda must then travel back through the many aisles of the store to regroup. Joining their odyssey is a neurotic Jewish bagel named Sammy (Edward Norton), and an angry, pious flat-bread wrap named Lavash (David Krumholtz). Along the way Frank discovers that their purpose in the lives of their gods may not be the heaven they had in mind.
Lavash and Sammy’s contentious relationship underlines the movie’s more shocking sources of comedy; a total surrender to outdated racial and cultural stereotypes. The food in the store is segregated into ethnicities (Mexican, German, Middle Eastern, Asian…etc), and while the film tries to justify their reductive depictions through the script’s themes of cultural unity in the face of blind faith and superstition, the glee it exudes from exploiting these stereotypes cannot be removed from its comedic premise.
For all of its bombast and expensive production values, this movie just isn’t funny enough. The dialogue is riddled with expletives and filthy innuendo from the first frame, and while South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have made an art out of profane satire in animation, this screenplay is far lazier in its execution. The writers seemed to believe that to show a cartoon character cursing is funny enough on its own without properly set-up jokes or subversive insight to support each scene. What results is a series of unfunny conversation set-pieces that sound transcribed from preteen boy’s locker room. Case in point; Nick Kroll voices the villain of the story, a feminine product who calls himself “The Douche.”
The movie works best when it explores the violent, darker places within its premise. After escaping the clutches of death from a human, Michael Cera’s character, Barry, leads us into unpredictable and absurdly macabre situations when he ties to make it back to the store to warn his friends of certain doom. These moments are based more on vivid imagery that properly utilizing its animated context--unlike the bumbling primary plot, which relies too heavily on hard-R raunch and Rogen's obligatory pot jokes.
The film has an interesting message about how religious interpretations can divide us in this life while we worry too much about what's in the next, but as a comedy “Sausage Party” is largely a one-trick pony. While its tone-deaf racial humor is supposed to be boldly irreverent, much of it is cringe inducing, and with this much time and effort put into the animation process there is no excuse for the comedy be this tired.
Grade: C-
Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Sausage Party."
