Sausage Party

Whatever you may think of Seth Rogen, I appreciate the fact that he can surround himself with like-minded people and from time to time release something into the world that studios don't usually have the balls to do. Like a film about the assassination of Kim Jong Un or Sausage Party. On the face of it, it's exactly what you'd expect, a cheap but still decent-looking animated film full of dirty and vulgar jokes, some of which might not even pass muster with the writers of South Park – the final five minutes are a great test of the audience's taste. At the same time, it's all surprisingly smart, working with themes that are perhaps too ambitious for such a film at first glance, and together it works perfectly. Sausage Party is ninety minutes long, and they don’t waste time, so the pacing is lethal, the cadence of the jokes more than satisfying, and you'll find enough ideas that you'll never think of this animated madness as mere self-indulgent vulgarity. Yeah, it's vulgar, but it's also intelligent, surprising and, above all, terribly funny. (15.05.2017)

I had a dream about fat stars, who, stoned on a couch, who came up with the idea of film in which they want to insert a talking wiener into a chubby bun. Then I woke up, I was at the cinema watching Sausage Party, and it looked more like a first-rate nightmare. Points for penetrating the sterile moralistic vacuum of animators, zero for any real subversiveness and meatiness. A soy substitute for things by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. A Lavash bagel having sex is not enough for me to squirt light mayonnaise, you sausages. (31.08.2016)

I'm not under the illusion that this script was created any differently than with the main group meeting over a pile of food sometime around Independence Day, with the meeting interspersed with consuming various substances and a Toy Story marathon, and the job got done. In terms of parodies, it turned out quite funny as expected, but in terms of half-hearted socio-cultural comments and reminders, it was sweatily and clumsily done. Yet what destroys me the most is the constant need to swear, to randomly insert sexual innuendos into every scene, and to finish the last ten minutes with an extra coarse spectacle, maybe just for fun, to see if any of the viewers can handle it. Moreover, Seth Rogen keeps dwelling on the thousandth variation of how a character is under the influence of drugs, and that doesn't seem as funny to me as it is perplexing that his approach to these jokes has stopped evolving and instead has started to regress. (19.08.2018)

If it were a funny politically incorrect animated movie, I would definitely appreciate it. But Seth Rogen should not have been smoking weed so much the whole time writing the script. Some scenes are funny, but I would probably have to be stoned as well to start laughing in most cases. Disgusting stuff alternates with perversion. It is not funny and there is only one real breaking point in the end of the movie, but even that could be appreciated only by someone as perverted as Marquis de Sade. And only if that pervert was a sausage in a US convenience store so he can understand the main characters in this film – sausages in the US convenience store. (07.06.2017)

The anti-LEGO Movie. The protagonists have been brainwashed by a (corporate) ideology according to which the point of existence is to wait for one of the “Gods” to choose you and take you to the Promised Land, where a Jewish bagel and a Muslim lavash will find peace and quiet, otherwise leading to an endless dispute over who is entitled to occupy the “western shelves” of the supermarket. They are unaware that instead of 77 bottles of virgin olive oil and other pleasures, what awaits them is a painful death in a pot of boiling water or in a meat grinder. Every workday begins with a collective sing-along of an idiotic feel-good song in the mould of “Everything is Awesome”, which the characters want to continue singing even after coming to the realisation that maybe everything isn’t so wonderful. It’s just more comfortable for them to keep believing in the illusion that they have created for themselves, which offers them solace instead of existential angst. Unfortunate historical experience discourages dogmatically clinging to optimism, so let’s pretend that the past doesn’t exist and continue to live a lie. It seems that hedonism is the only satisfactory alternative to faith in salvation, which requires, among other things, the renunciation of physical pleasures. We are all going to die eventually anyway (with the exception of non-perishable foods), so why not at least lick a bun or smoke a beet before we do and make our joyless existence a little more pleasant. Of course, the anti-consumerist message of a film produced by a giant media corporation cannot be taken too seriously, and Sausage Party deserves credit for not wanting anything of the sort from the viewer. On the other hand, it is perhaps a pity that behind the veil of ultra-simple jokes, it’s a bit hard to see how clever and subversive a film Rogen’s crew came up with this time. After all, the biggest monster is not the talking can of deodorant, but the character of a random human consumer, living in the belief that there will always be something to eat. If nothing else, the mere fact that you feel compelled to root for a talking sausage, desiccated chewing gum and a busty bun in their struggle against people like you (i.e. people who are guilty of consumerism) can be considered a win for the filmmakers. 85% (26.08.2016)