SAUSAGE PARTY - REVIEW

Seth Rogen's first jump into animated waters last year was met with mixed reactions, to say the least. Sausage Party's early trailers looked like a fun and clever R-rated romp but the more critics and audiences learned about the film, the more their excitement for it decreased.

Close to the film's release, some controversy surrounding the animators being overworked and underpaid surfaced. The bad press continued but even if some critics were lukewarm towards to the film, it was still a significant box-office hit with audiences flocking to see it. The good thing about Sausage Party's success is it presented studios with another convincing pro R-rated blockbusters argument soon after Deadpool which should guarantee that we'll see less and less neutered content in theatres. The film is proudly raunchy with the whole plot being centered around a hot dog wanting to slip inside a bun, every single character swearing non-stop and an end orgy that makes the puppet sex scene in Team America: World Police look cute. Rogen and co certainly didn't hold anything back and that's both an endearing aspect of the film and its most off-putting feature. Swearing and dirty jokes can be funny and some of them are in this movie but there's so much of it that it gets old fast.

The irony is that Sausage Party could have actually been a more effective film with a PG-13 rating as the story, the characters and the animation are all good enough to work without all the forced bro humour. Besides, the funniest jokes in the film are the subtler, more cartoonish ones. That said, there is a lot to enjoy in this movie: the cast is fun (especially Danny McBride), the gory moments are genuinely messed-up, the puns are corny and proud of it and the whole film is a clever Pixar spoof and one wishes there were more of those. It's surprising, however, that the writers felt the need to include SO many stereotypes in the film and there's a mean-spirited edge to the film that's not all that pleasant but the goal there might have been to poke fun at shortcomings in modern kids' animated films which do have their share of questionable stereotypes etc. so that's forgivable.

All in all, Sausage Party was a great idea and it was realised with all the gross-out, sex-themed, F-bomb splattered raunchiness it promised. It doesn't all work and parts of it are frankly obnoxious but it makes a solid case for another R-rated genre and that alone makes it worth it.

Entertaining mess.