Sausage Party Review

sausage-party

The most interesting aspects of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’ Sausage Party are what they’re NOT promoting. Sure, the movie revels in its own bad taste, with just as many sex jokes and f-bombs as you’d expect from the Pixar-but-perverted slant of its ad campaign. But the film has far more to say about the failings of organized religion: its usage to paper over very real human fears, its role in global conflicts and warfare, its hindrance of actual scientific development, and its tendency to shame people for their inherent desires. Sausage Party empathizes with believers, but never obfuscates where it stands in regard to faith.

It’s a bold, refreshing, and inherently risky stance for a studio film to make, which is probably why it’s not the part of Sausage Party that is being sold to the masses. Sausage Party’s moral can be boiled down to “promote Atheism over religion, but don’t be a dick about it,” which is a hard sell to a country in which over 75% of the population identifies themselves as having faith in a higher power. Sausage Party is not likely to change anybody’s minds on such a grand subject, but it’s fascinating to me that a project could be greenlit at all,  let alone be one of the biggest success stories of the summer.

Its theological story isn’t the only trick up Sausage Party’s sleeve. The creative team borrows heavily from Toy Story, but one element it leaves behind is the “they only come alive when we’re not around” conceit. Sausage Party often shows moments from two different points of views: the colorful world of the living consumable items, and the dulled real-world, in which all of the main “characters” are inanimate objects. I don’t want to give much else away, but the way that the film plays with this boundary and ultimately subverts it is extremely clever.

In fact, there’s enough innovation in Sausage Party that the moments when it aspires to little more than its “food items that want to have sex” selling-point are its most disappointing. Some of this is thematically necessary, given the focus on how religion pointlessly shames and inhibits sexuality, but at times it feels forced. By the time the movie reaches its much-publicized “food orgy,” it feels more obligatory than inspired. I’m sure this moment was outlined and set into motion very early in Sausage Party’s creative genesis, but it seems to come and go in the narrative with no real impact.

The film also closes on a sort of indulgent note, with a tacked-on joke that could have been excised to end on a more narratively satisfying note. However, what the ending implies could be interesting for a sequel, which is looking pretty feasible after Sausage Party’s surprisingly high box office success. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg took their story in unexpected directions this time out, so it’s only fitting that a follow-up would innovate in a completely different way.

Sausage Party could have been exactly what was sold in the commercials, and that wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing. CGI animation has been used primarily in family films since its inception, so subverting those expectations at all feels fresh. But the film deserves accolades for going above and beyond the call of duty. It may be the raunch that sold Sausage Party to the masses, but its the subversive messaging that’s going to turn it into a cult classic down the road.

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