SAUSAGE PARTY MOVIE REVIEW

WURST. HEROES. EVER.

A companion piece of sorts to their similarly raunchy yet theologically-minded This Is the End, writer-producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Sausage Party is a raucous animated comedy whose humor is frequently as low brow as its goals are high-minded. This is a R-rated toon about grocery store foods and products facing an existential crisis, one that explores and satirizes everything from the politics of the Middle East to religious dogma and sexual mores. It’s also consistently hilarious and unafraid to insult anyone and everyone. Nothing is sacred in Sausage Party and that is part of its demented charm.

After opening with a rousing and raunchy musical number by none other than Oscar-winning Disney composer Alan Menken, the story settles into how on the eve of the July 4th holiday the food products of super-sized grocery store Shopwell's are looking forward to being chosen by the gods (human customers) and then taken to the Great Beyond where a glorious fate must surely await them.

For a hot dog like Frank (voiced by Rogen) and a bun like Brenda (voiced by Kristen Wiig) it means they can finally consummate their heretofore “just the tips” romance. But after a traumatized Honey Mustard warns his fellow items that all they believe about the Great Beyond is a lie and only death and horror are in store, Frank finds himself on a quest for answers. What he learns shakes him to his core and his subsequent attempts to spread the truth to his fellow foods is met with the sort of shock, disdain, and blowback one could expect from the most pious being told definitively that there is no God.

The film’s heady, theological quest is off-set by plenty of sexual innuendo (and outright near X-rated gags) and crude humor at the expense of every ethnic and racial stereotype imaginable (from Mexican tacos to Irish potatoes to a Jewish bagel and a Middle Easter lavash). There is the Native American liquor Firewater (voiced by Bill Hader) and a young, gay Twinkie named, well, Twink.

If any of these examples infuriate and offend you without any further context then Sausage Party is definitely not the film for you. This is a film where there’s a bad guy who is a literal douche (voiced by Nick Kroll) and where cosmic truths are revealed by inhaling bath salts.

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