Sausage Party (2016) review

(Disclaimer: I don’t usually do this but there are going to be some MAJOR SPOILERS at the end of this review following the rating as I will be delving into how much the film has changed since I saw it at SXSW. Also some of you might have recently heard of the controversies surrounding this film’s production, namely the fact that some of its animators were overworked and underpaid. It’s certainly a troubling situation but I will not be bringing it up in the review.)

It’s time once again to talk more about one of the films that I got to see early at SXSW in Austin, Texas this past March. And this one, Sausage Party, is a particularly noteworthy one because when it premiered there on March 14^th, it wasn’t finished yet. It was shown in ‘rough cut’ form, with some of the animation being unfinished. It so wasn’t finished yet that there was actually a scene that was just storyboards and apparently it had actually been screened sometime prior to that as nothing but storyboards. So because it was only a ‘Rough Cut’, I decided not to give it an official rating in my 2016 SXSW Recap Post. However, now the film is finally out in its finished state, meaning that I now have the opportunity to review it properly. Sausage Party is certainly a unique entry in the animated genre. While it may seem like your typical Disney/Dreamworks affair, namely in regards to the cartoony designs of its main characters that would certainly fit in any other animated film, believe me when I say that this is not an animated film you’re going to want to take your kids to. This is a very much R-rated animated flick that is as crass and filled to the brim with sexual innuendos and pot as you’d probably expect from the duo behind it; Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. But if you can look pass all of the juvenile references, sex talk, and pot jokes, Sausage Party is actually a rather smartly written animated flick that very much takes advantage of its more mature rating, though maybe a bit too much at times, to produce a hilariously dark spin on what, on the surface, would seem like something you’d see in a Disney film.

The film mainly takes place within the confines of a supermarket called Shopwell’s. In this supermarket, its various food items are living beings who dream of being taken by ‘the gods’ [humans] and brought out of the store into ‘the Great Beyond’. One of these foods is a sausage named Frank (Seth Rogen) who dreams of being chosen along with his girlfriend, a hot dog bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig), so that they take their relationship beyond ‘just the tips’. As fate would have it, they do end up getting chosen together by a female shopper during Fourth of July weekend. However, a jar of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) that had been previously brought to ‘the Great Beyond’ but was then returned to the store warns them that the ‘Great Beyond’ is nothing but a bunch of BS and jumps off of the cart to his death, ultimately resulting in Frank, Brenda, a lavash named Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz), and a bagel named Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) falling out of the cart as well following a collision with another cart. Now on their own as the store closes for the night, the quartet decide to journey back to their aisles, all the while dealing with a douche (Nick Kroll, and by ‘douche’ I mean the feminine hygiene product) that seeks revenge against Frank for getting his nozzle bent. It is during this time that Frank begins to learn more about what Honey Mustard was talking about and through a meeting with the ‘immortal’ non-perishables led by liquor bottle Firewater (Bill Hader), Frank finally learns the truth about the ‘Great Beyond’; it is a lie. Even worse, when food is taken by humans, the humans end up “killing their asses”, resulting in Frank having to try and reveal the horrible truth to his peers before it’s too late.

The humor in Sausage Party is very much what’d you expect from Rogen and Goldberg; it’s full of sexual innuendo, pot jokes, etc. And in the case of this film, that also means quite a lot of food-related puns. Pretty much any food pun that you can think of is probably in this film. Now as far as the humor is concerned, I must say that this film actually has a really solid gag-to-laugh ratio. It will legitimately have you guffawing throughout and while on the surface it may seem like a really stupid food version of Toy Story, the writing is actually much more complex than you think. Yes, amidst all of the f-bombs, marijuana use, and many, many, MANY stereotypes that are represented in food form, there’s actually quite a bit of in-depth social commentary in this film, namely in regards to religion as represented by the food of Shopwell’s being led to believe that nothing bad ever happens to food, which of course isn’t true in their cases. Instead, the film promotes unity amongst cultures and taking control of your own life. So yeah… this film basically gives the idea of religion the middle finger. With that said, admittedly sometimes the film can be a little too crass for its own good. I mean, sure, I get it, it’s an R-rated animated film so they do have much more creative leeway to get away with stuff that you would NEVER see in something from Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks. Still, there are times where it does feel like they’re just relishing in the fact that it’s R, meaning plenty of f-bombs thrown out here and there really for no real reason other than they can. Thankfully, that only happens a few times in the film.

Animation-wise the film is perfectly fine as a film made by a non-Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks studio with a low budget. It’s nothing special, for the record, but it does definitely deserve some credit for the ways in which it brings this world of food to life, mainly through its character designs. It also certainly does its job in giving the film a Disney-esque style with its own cartoonish and colorful style. Heck, they even got Alan Menken, the man who has brought us countless iconic Disney songs over the years, to do the film’s opening musical number. Needless to say all of this gets really hilarious when the filmmakers start to do more adult stuff with the animation, namely in the ending which, without giving anything away, is something that truly needs to be seen to be believed. The same can be said for scenes in which food characters are brutally killed by humans. Obviously it isn’t graphic in the same way that scenes like this would be if they involved humans but it does still provide a hilariously disturbing sight. As for the voice cast, pretty much every one is spot on for their respective roles; Seth Rogen as Frank, Kristen Wiig as Brenda, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera as some of Frank’s fellow sausages with the latter being viewed as a runt due to him being a deformed sausage, Edward Norton as the Woody Allen-ish Sammy Bagel Jr. (no joke, some people at the SXSW screening didn’t even realize it was Norton until the end of the film), Salma Hayek as a lesbian taco shell who harbors feelings for Brenda, etc. Admittedly most of the characters are rather one-note save for a few (e.g. Cera’s character Barry) but the cast does make it all work in the long run.  

Now like I said before, when I first saw this film I didn’t give it a rating at the time because it was only a ‘Rough Cut’. Plus, because the SXSW crowd was so into it (I’m pretty sure there were a few stoners in there… this is a Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg film, after all), sometimes I couldn’t even hear the dialogue. So now I’ve finally seen the film in its final form and overall I must say that it really is a solid animated flick. For one thing, the film is absolutely hilarious from beginning to end; most of the jokes, even some of the obviously offensive ones, do hit. And while on the surface this whole premise of food learning of their true purpose in life may sound really silly, and let’s be honest that’s exactly what it is, the writing can actually be rather smart at times, namely through how it comments on religion and the beliefs that one has through said religion. Pair that with the hilarious mash-up of Disney-style animation with the messed up crap that goes on in this film and the absolutely spot-on voice cast and you just have one absolutely crazy but still highly entertaining animated feature. Like Deadpool and superhero films earlier this year, perhaps Sausage Party will open the door for more R-rated animated films. Clearly people are open for films like this that aren’t afraid to be a bit more mature despite being part of a genre that’s mostly seen PG-rated stories. I’ve seen quite a few great R-rated animated films before; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, Team America: World Police, etc. So hopefully thanks to this film, we’ll be seeing more down the road, including the certainty that is a sequel to this film, which ends on quite an interesting note that will no doubt set up an even crazier follow-up.  

Rating: 4/5

****

SPOILER SECTION (IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM YET, READ NO FURTHER!!)

So as I’ve been saying throughout this review, when I saw this at SXSW not all of the animation was finished. Some scenes were in the early stages of rendering and some of them didn’t even feature full character animation yet. This was primarily the case during the opening song number and pretty much most of the finale, including the scene in which Frank tries to rally the supermarket food to fight ‘the Gods’ and, yes, even the infamous orgy scene. There was also one additional scene that didn’t end up in the theatrical cut. After the food have their massive orgy, Frank and friends learn from Firewater that they are actually only ‘cartoons’ brought to life by animators and voiced by celebrities like Seth Rogen and Edward Norton. The wise figure that is Gum then reveals that he has built an inter-dimensional device that would allow them to travel to their creators’ world. Frank and co. decide to enter it and they end up in Los Angeles right across the street from a diner where Seth Rogen, Michael Cera, and Edward Norton are having lunch. As the trio talk about doing an animated film about talking food, Frank and friends storm into the diner through the window to attack them. Now for the record I don’t know if this was actually intended to be in the film. The animation in this scene was completely non-existent; it was literally just the 2-D models of the characters on a 2-D plane set against the live-action footage. I mean personally I think it would’ve been a funny little ending tag seeing Rogen, Cera, and Norton get attacked by the food but it’s probably for the better that they didn’t use this scene. Instead, the film ends as Frank and his friends go into the portal. With that said, though, perhaps this scene will be featured on the Blu-Ray. It would certainly set the stage for what will no doubt happen in the sequel as Frank and co. interact with ‘their creators’.   

22 Jump Street (2014) review

At the beginning of ‘22 Jump Street’, Officers Schmidt and Jenko are in the office of Deputy Chief Hardy who says the following statement to them; “Ladies, no one gave a s*** about the Jump Street reboot but you got lucky…” That statement alone can pretty much sum up how 2012’s ‘21 Jump Street’ turned out. I mean, I doubt that many people were actually looking forward to the film, being that it was a film based off of an old TV show of the same name from the 1980’s that was perhaps most famous for launching the career of Johnny Depp more than anything else. But in the end, ‘21 Jump Street’ ended up being one of the funniest films of that year and now directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who are coming into this fresh off of this year’s smash hit ‘The LEGO Movie’, and the main cast return for the sequel, ‘22 Jump Street’. Now of course, we all know that most comedy sequels tend to be pretty inferior to their predecessors, usually because a lot of them just copy the same plot as the first film but don’t have the same good material to work with. And while this film does basically copy the same plot of its predecessor, at the same time the filmmakers are completely aware of that and because of that, ‘22 Jump Street’ turns out to be one of the best comedy sequels of all time due to the fact that it’s so self-aware of what it is doing.

After their successful stint going undercover as high school students as part of the resurrected ‘Jump Street’ program, Officers Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) are eager to continue working as regular police officers. However, after a botched attempt at capturing a group of drug dealers, Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman) puts them back into the program (now located at 22 Jump Street after the Koreans bought back the church at 21 Jump Street) because, as he puts it, the reason they failed to catch the drug dealers was because they weren’t doing the ‘same undercover student thing’ that they did the first time. As for this time, Schmidt and Jenko are assigned by Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) to go undercover at M.C. State in order to locate the supplier of a new drug referred to as WHYPHY which, like the drug from the last film, resulted in the death of a student. While their mission seems simple enough (after all, this is the same exact mission they did before when they went undercover as high school students), Schmidt and Jenko’s relationship starts to be challenged when Jenko befriends a jock on the football team named Zook (Wyatt Russell), resulting in Schmidt beginning to feel left out.

So yeah, this film’s plot is basically just rehashing the same beats from the first film with not too many differences in regards to how it’s structured; Schmidt and Jenko try to do their jobs as cops, they mess up, they’re sent undercover to find a drug supplier, and their relationship starts to become strained when one of them becomes more popular than the other. Really the only difference here is that Jenko is the one who becomes popular, not Schmidt. So with all of that said, why then is the material here just as good as it was in the previous film, if arguably not better? Well, the main reason for this is, as I stated earlier, the cast and crew do realize that they are copying the same plot as the first film. The amount of meta humor in this film is ridiculously high. It constantly acknowledges the similar plot threads along with the fact that they have a bigger budget this time to work with ($50 million compared to the first film’s $42 million budget) although, halfway through the movie, it’s noted that they’re really starting to run out of money. Because of this, this film could probably go down as one of the smartest comedy films of all time for managing to have so much great humor in this film while also playing off of the fact that we’ve seen all of this already in the previous film.

As in the first film, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are both terrific here and of course one of the greatest strengths of the film as a whole is their camaraderie with each other (or, to reference the RT consensus, ‘bromantic chemistry’). These two work off each other so well and I really like how in this film, Tatum does some really impressive stunt work in this that doesn’t really seem that possible for anyone to do (in fact, I’m pretty sure I recall that at one point, Schmidt (who of course they play up as not being as fit as Jenko) says that he’s like Superman or something… ironic considering how Tatum played Superman in ‘The LEGO Movie’). They also give Ice Cube more to do here than in the first film (where really all he did was just yell at Schmidt and Jenko… this time he becomes much more involved in the plot) which then results in one of the film’s funniest moments. Now don’t worry, I won’t dare give it away but I will say that it does revolve around an incredibly awkward situation that emerges between him and Schmidt due to something that the latter does in this that, simply put, the Captain doesn’t approve of. The other new additions to the cast, including Wyatt Russell, Amber Stevens, and Jillian Bell also do really good jobs as well.

I know that I talked about this a few months ago when I reviewed ‘The LEGO Movie’ but after seeing how this film turned out I once again have to point out directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s phenomenal track record. They’ve made two excellent animated films; one based off of a very short children’s book and the other based off a toy line, the latter of which could have easily have ended up being nothing more than a commercial for the brand. Then they made an excellent live-action comedy out of an old TV show, which ironically was a drama in its first iteration. Now, they’ve made quite frankly one of the best comedy sequels of all time, if arguably not the best. These two have made a name for themselves when it comes to taking projects that don’t seem like they would be able to work and being able to make phenomenal films out of them. And in regards to this film, that’s saying a lot considering that this film’s plot is a near ‘carbon-copy’ of the first film. But thankfully, everyone involved realized this resulting in a film that is incredibly self-aware of what it’s doing with excellent material that has quite a lot of meta humor in it. This is easily my favorite comedy of the year so far; in fact, dare I say it, I think this film’s even better than the first one.

(P.S. Make sure to stick around for the first half of the end credits. Why? Because you don’t want to miss some of the best ending credits to ever be in a film.)

Rating: 4.5/5