Sausage Party (Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon, 2016)

[Professor Wagstaff]

Sausage Party

[Luke M]

Sausage Party is awful. Suicide Squad fans are upset about its low Rotten Tomatoes score, but on the other spectrum Sausage Party doesn't come close to its 83% score. The filmmakers seemed to think having characters swear in a CG animated film was funny enough because they didn't try anything else. The worst thing about it is how surprisingly unfunny it is.

[mfunk9786]

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of a RottenTomatoes "score" - even if a bunch of critics only moderately like a movie, it's going to have a high overall percentage, but it isn't until you look at the "Average Rating" - for example, for Sausage Party, it's 6.8 out of 10 - that you get a reasonable idea of what you're dealing with. It seems that people who have the most frustrations with RottenTomatoes (crummy branding and lousy web design aside) don't even know how to use it as a resource and fundamentally misunderstand how it works.

[Ribs]

Because of being a binary, yes/no scale, it functions better as a relative probability of liking something assuming you are generally of sound mind. 27% of people like Suicide Squad - sounds about right. 83% like Sausage Party - seems reasonable enough, as well. As it doesn't allow for weighting based on the strength of the review, how good or bad it may or may not be to each critic beyond the superficial like/dislike line means nothing.

[Luke M]

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of a RottenTomatoes "score" - even if a bunch of critics only moderately like a movie, it's going to have a high overall percentage, but it isn't until you look at the "Average Rating" - for example, for Sausage Party, it's 6.8 out of 10. It seems that people who have the most frustrations with RottenTomatoes (crummy branding and lousy web design aside) don't even know how to use it as a resource and fundamentally misunderstand how it works.

This is fair. However, I could not find the average rating on their Flixster app nor the mobile version of the site. Which leads me to believe that they trust that their percentage score is supposed to account for these sort of borderline fresh/rotten scores.

[knives]

Sausage Party is easily the worst film of Rogen's career and has to be the worst of the year. The animation is awful to an extent that is absolutely inexusable. Even if this was actually polished to the point of aesthetic competency it would still be awful. Like a lot of other films written by Rogen the big flaw here is an over stuffing of ideas which isn't in itself too terrible thing, but the way the two biggest concerns conflict ruin the film in total. The film is premised entirely in a world that is as filthy as the human imagination allows with hardly a second going by without a joke that would make Cartman blush. Admittedly this leads to only one good joke, that curse words in this realm are harmless ones in this world and vice versa, but that would lead to a mere shrug only. If it weren't for how it undermines the central theme in total leaving a sense of disgust which is cheap.

Utilizing food and the common be unique concept of animated films as a critique of religion is a brilliant starting off point which I desperately want to see handled in more competent hands. As is it's a very surface level take on the matter with less wit then any random minute of Bunuel. The arguments between the hero and the other food items might be true to the life of a message board on how religion is handled, but that makes it at best a very shallow critique. There is one astute bit at the end where the film talks about how assaulting a person's beliefs won't ever persuade them, but that's barely dealt with.

Spoiler

Now about that ending which renders this utter trash. By itself the rebelling against and making literal the concept of killing your gods is kind of brilliant. I'm not sure if doing it in such a grotesque manner works, but whatever. That orgy though while fitting into the anti-Disney premise totally ruins the religion theme as it makes the argument a strict binary between puritan religiosity or a pure violent and sexual hedonism right down to a 'comical' rape sequence intended as retribution against slavery (the film's racial politics are utterly pathetic to say the least). That's not just an insult to both sides of the argument, but makes the religious one seem more pleasant as for its flaws it puts some control on these truly horrible people.

Also, and this isn't usually a personal bother, how this world works doesn't make any sense. Barry and Carl's escape shows how people see the movement of these food stuffs, but that just leads to the question of how she rationalized them going to the window sill. Also what does the douche living mean? He's the only non food stuff we see alive with a lot of evidence suggesting boxes, silverware, and other utensils aren't alive in this world so why is this one thing alive? Little things like that nag excessively.

[colinr0380]

The thing that has been keeping me away from the film (and I know that I probably shouldn't be asking such things of an animated comedy based around genitalia shaped foods having sex) is how does processed food have a consciousness anyway? I could perhaps believe it from the point of view of whole vegetables getting chopped up and eaten, but did the sausages and buns etc only get 'born' once they were cut out of dead animals or moulded in a recipe to make bread, and so on? Let alone for something like a sausage, which is the mongrel of the meat world, bits of it coming from all over!

This may be something that gets addressed in the film itself but when exactly were they 'born'? Were they 'born' only when they were imbued with a human use? Specifically one involving getting shoved inside the human body in some fashion?

[knives]

It's not dealt with at all and in fact gets further confused by Mentos where it seems that the wrapper is alive and when it commits suicide each tablet is alive.

[domino harvey]

Sausage Party is easily the worst film of Rogen's career

I didn't know a bar could be set so low!

[flyonthewall2983]

My 60-something step-father bought this on DVD (he impulsively buys them at WalMart), thinking it was a family-friendly movie.

[knives]

It has rated R printed in big letters on the cover. You have to be blind to miss it.

[flyonthewall2983]

Like I said, he does this impulsively (I can't complain too much, extra copies have helped my library out a little) which means he maybe glanced at the cover once or twice without inspecting it too much.

[Roger Ryan]

Inexplicably perhaps (I've not seen the film), Sausage Party made A.O. Scott's top ten for the year.