K-SCORE: 27
Directors: Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan
Writers: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Ariel Shaffir, Kyle Hunter
Starring: Seth Rogen, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig, Edward Norton, Salma Hayek, Nick Kroll, Craig Robertson, Bill Hader, James Franco, Dannie McBride, Paul Rudd - their usual crew
Spoiler Level: Just how much do you want to know about the sex between the lesbian taco and the hot dog bun?
“This is the kind of idea that people... scribble on a napkin they later use to clean vomit off their toilet seat”
With a premise this stupid, the film is immune to most forms of criticism. I punished Seth Rogen a few films after his Neighbors disaster, though I have promised my brothers to watch Neighbors 2 if one of my reviews gets a thousand hits. (Maybe I should have made it ten thousand.) But I’m back for his particular brand of idiocy again, and I’m not impressed, but also not nearly as upset. In fact, when I read that he’d been trying to make this stupid juvenile piece of crap for eight years, I smiled widely. Imagine what’s going on in your life that you’re fighting to get an obscene and nonsensical film about anthropomorphic food made. This is the kind of idea that people get when they’re somehow intoxicated, scribble on a napkin they later use to clean vomit off their toilet seat, and then flush. The difference here is that Seth Rogen keeps his vomit-stained toilet napkins, frames them, and gets all his Hollywood friends to star in offensive bit roles until he has himself about two-thirds of a movie.
Sausage Party is way better than the usual stuff spewed forth from this clique of filmmakers. I laughed. Not often, but it happened. Mostly they’re shock laughs. This is a new term I’m trying out for things that aren’t actually that funny but because you weren’t expecting them and they’re absurd enough or loud enough or gross enough they elicit a response. It’s the comedic equivalent of the jump scare, cheap substitutes for quality. I found it funny when Michael Cera’s hot dog returned to the grocery store with the severed head of James Franco’s bath-salts addict. I got some sick satisfaction watching peanut butter weep over the shattered corpse of his dead jelly wife. And when the diet coke bottle told the pack of mentos, “It’s better to die free than to live in bondage,” before their great sacrifice, that was quality cinema. Other than that, the scenes ranged from mediocre to really bad. Sometimes they make food puns and innuendos that relate to what grocery store items they are, which is what you want. More often though they fall back on racial stereotypes because being clever is difficult. Even more often they’re just cursing and being violent.
With this, you’re never getting a brilliant plotline, complex characters, or some kind of purpose behind the narrative. I’m not asking for one. I’m just asking that the film not needlessly insert further celebrations of all things pot. Potheads are so annoying. Can their lives ever be about something else? It didn’t make sense for the food characters to be acquiring weed, it wasn’t funny when they smoked the weed, and the scenes with weed added nothing to advance the film's bumpy story.
“Did their comedic creativity end at Jewish bagel character?”
Worse than that, the premise is about food that is also alive and doesn’t want to get eaten. I was frustrated by inconsistencies like: the jar of honey mustard had eyes on it and talked from its lid but other foods were shown to be alive from within their packages and had to get out of them. The jar is the package for the mustard. That’s nothing compared to the premise-crushing problem of inserting non-food item characters, like the literal douche antagonist and the roll of toilet paper. Did their comedic creativity end at Jewish bagel character? They couldn’t come up with any more foods and the promise of a roll of toilet paper that’s been through some dark experiences was too tempting to pass up? All of those character just made me wonder why some things in the film were objects and others were characters. And I had lots of time to wonder because Sausage Party is pretty boring and extremely idiotic.
I watched it though because a little while ago I read a complex apology from an Australian website called AutoStraddle that wanted to post a review of the film but didn’t want to watch it so hired a freelancer to share his or her opinion on it and that review was at least somewhat positive. Then some members of the LGBT community complained that Sausage Party’s depiction of lesbians is offensive because of the predatory way the lesbian taco lusts after and eventually performs sex acts on a hot dog bun. The site, still without watching the movie, issued a retraction and apology for ever condoning such cinema and their letter is one of the craziest, most deluded, most hateful, pieces of writing I’ve ever read, all for a crass film about hot dogs that don’t want to be eaten. I wanted to see just how much these women had blown out of proportion the issue of the stereotypical and harmful portrayal of lesbians in this movie that features a talking box of grits named Mr. Grits. Turns out, quite a bit.