TL;DR – Wow, this movie is all kind of messed up, but it is also really quite interesting at times, but the whole anti-Toy Story spin does start to wear thin after a while.

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Review –

I think for the first time since Deadpool (Review) I need to open up this review with a clear advisory warning, this is not a movie for children, it is full of violence, sex, drugs, and language, please for the love of everything do not take your 5 year olds to it. As well as this, I am sure that Sausage Party will offend a lot of people, which should come to no surprise given Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s last film The Interview (Review) was so offensive to North Korea they went out of their way to stop it showing in theatres, but this is something to prepare yourself for, if you plan to go watch it.

So what is Sausage Party, well think of it like the anti-Toy Story, instead of your toys being alive, it is all the food and other produce that you buy at a store. This, of course, creates a completely messed up ethical situation which we will get to in the next paragraph. As far as the animations are concerned, they’re quite good, with clear stylistic references from a number of Dreamworks & Pixar films. The voice acting is quite good, each actor embodies their produce quite well. The plot moves along at a good pace, it does not waste time, which is not too surprising considering this is an animated film, it is expensive to animate faff. One big critique I do have is that some of the characters in the movie move away from just being stereotypes into more problematic representations that probably didn’t need to be there, and indeed one character engages in what is clearly a nonconsensual sexual act which is quite troubling. So from a production standpoint it is a solid animated production, but then you are not going to go see this for the animations, you are going to see this to see how messed up this film is.

So how messed up is it, well this is a Seth Rogen film where the two main characters are a sausage Frank (Seth Rogen) and a bun Brenda (Kristen Wiig) and you can probably think off the top of your head the numerous innuendoes you could make about that. As well as this, there are clear, ‘I can’t believe they were allowed to put that in the film’ moments, especially in the third act. Now we are going to get into the story a little bit and look at the philosophy of the film, but to do that we need to stray into spoiler territory so a [SPOILER WARNING] is now in effect. Amongst all the sex, violence, drugs, and language is actually an interesting philosophical argument, if you were going to know about your death and you could not stop it, would you want to know, or would you prefer to live in ignorant bliss? Sausage Party expands this further by analysing the role of religion in society and what it has and has not been used for. Now given the style, this exploration is anything but subtitle, which would have been a better approach, but it is interesting to see things discussed that you would not normally see in a traditional Hollywood film. As well as this, there is an undercurrent of the Israel/Palestine conflict which was presented … well, the presentation of the conflict is quite novel. Of course one has to mention the 10 minute food orgy at the end of the film that had people walking out even if they sat though the rest of the film. I will say as far as the story goes, it does fall a bit flat when it takes one twist too many in the closing moments, and I think the film would have been stronger if they just skipped that section completely.

In the end, you probably knew if you were going to go see this film or give it a wide berth just from the trailers, and I would suggest that your gut is probably right on that one. It is irreverent, fascinating, gross, lured, brash & interesting but I don’t think many will find it very enjoyable.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Directed by – Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon
Story by – Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg & Jonah Hill
Screenplay by – Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter & Ariel Shaffir
Starring – Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, Nick Kroll, David Krumholtz, Salma Hayek & Edward Norton
Rating – Australia: MA15+; Canada: 18A; NZ: R; UK: 15; USA: R