Sausage Party (2016)
[7]
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg co-wrote and co-produced this R-rated animated satire about a grocery store hot dog (voiced by Rogen) that discovers the truth about life outside the store’s sliding glass doors. But it’s an uphill battle to convince the rest of the grocery denizens that their idea of ‘heaven’ is actually the gnashing teeth of human beings! Sausage Party delivers all the naughty sexual innuendo you might expect, complete with a full-blown food orgy of epic proportions, but the script benefits even more from its religious allegory. I love that the Middle-Eastern crisis is depicted here between a bagel (Edward Norton) and a rolled pita bread (David Krumholtz). I love that our protagonists’ in-store villain is a jocky douche (Nick Kroll) that sucks the fluids from other store items to increase his strength. I love that the third act is ridiculously violent.
And I also love that same-sex attraction continues to be a no-big-deal in Rogen-affiliated projects. Here it’s most prominently captured in the character of a sexually repressed taco shell (the one and only Salma Hayek) who longs to perform cunnilingus on Rogen’s hot dog bun girlfriend (Kristen Wiig). Is the whole movie nothing but LGBTQ atheist propaganda? Probably not, but if you swing that way, you might enjoy it more than the rest of the crowd. And even if you don’t, Sausage Party is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen at the theater lately.
The film also features many other voices from Rogen’s posse, including James Franco, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, and Paul Rudd.