Sausage Par­ty

Like a plate of hot offal, there’s some­thing unde­ni­ably wrong yet strange­ly appetis­ing about this off-colour culi­nary com­e­dy from the baked minds of Seth Rogen, Evan Gold­berg and Jon­ah Hill. Billed as the first R‑rated com­put­er ani­mat­ed fea­ture, Sausage Par­ty is the kind of out-there con­cept movie that could only have been cooked up under a pur­ple haze. Accord­ing­ly the whole thing has the unmis­tak­able air of a group in-joke – it’s amus­ing rather than annoy­ing, but you get the sense the mate­r­i­al is fun­ni­est to those best acquaint­ed with it.

It’s easy to imag­ine Rogen and co sat around, spliffs and snacks in hand, flesh­ing out their pitch after tick­ling each oth­er with the ini­tial premise; eas­i­er still to spot the foun­da­tion­al scenes that appar­ent­ly cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion of super-pro­duc­er extra­or­di­naire Megan Elli­son. But aside from a hand­ful of deli­cious­ly crude set pieces, it’s sur­pris­ing to see the team behind high-grade ston­er come­dies like Super­bad, Pineap­ple Express and This Is the End oper­at­ing at rel­a­tive­ly low altitude.

Per­haps it stands to rea­son that a film set in a super­mar­ket fea­tur­ing car­toon gro­ceries should reach for the low­est hang­ing fruit. Even so, recur­ring ref­er­ences to the rise of Nazism, the Israel-Pales­tine con­flict and the geno­cide of Native Amer­i­cans feel espe­cial­ly glib in this con­text. This is a sto­ry, evi­dent­ly inspired by Toy Sto­ry 3, about a randy wiener who dis­cov­ers the hor­ri­fy­ing truth about the ​‘Great Beyond’, i.e. what hap­pens when food is plucked from the sanc­tu­ary of the shelf, and as such there’s real­ly no call for com­ment – how­ev­er super­fi­cial – on any such his­tor­i­cal atrocities.

To be fair, the film more than lives up to its Pixar-gone-polit­i­cal­ly-incor­rect promise, yet for all its pur­port­ed cul­tur­al obser­va­tion and glee­ful prej­u­dice skew­er­ing, you watch it think­ing, ​‘Yeah, and…’ This feel­ing is com­pound­ed by the dia­logue, which is so exces­sive­ly blue it’s as if the writ­ers are des­per­ate­ly try­ing to hit the required quo­ta of C and F‑bombs need­ed to achieve the desired cer­tifi­cate – that R rat­ing is both a badge of hon­our and a key sell­ing point.

You can’t help but won­der whether it would have been more effec­tive to tone down some of the broad­er adult themed humour in favour of a more refined, visu­al­ly-dri­ven script. The mere sight of an anthro­po­mor­phised used con­dom is far more enter­tain­ing than any­thing that comes out of its mouth; the dev­as­tat­ing trau­ma it has suf­fered plain for all to see. Sausage Par­ty is sil­ly fun for what it is, then, but if you’re hun­gry for some­thing smart, salty and gen­uine­ly sub­ver­sive you’d be bet­ter off tak­ing anoth­er bite of South Park: Big­ger, Longer & Uncut or even the first Ted movie.