BOING!

In many ways, it’s much better that this is a mini meh as opposed to going into details about what happens on screen with this one. Even the title says too much without directly showing anything bad upfront, though to be honest, you just have to wait till the end of the movie for that as it goes….

In a film which seems to have come out of nowhere with relatively small amounts of advertising save for some signs about previews on the previous Bank Holiday Monday, we find ourselves looking at a new adult animated film from Seth Rogan with an all star cast of voice actors which was actually quite surprising, but that doesn’t come close to what awaits you.

The setting for this ridiculous film is within a supermarket where in essence all the food and douches (yes….keep going) is alive and all just waiting for that magic day that they get chosen by the gods (aka, us normal human beings) to be taken to the great beyond where they will live in paradise. Our main hero, Frank who is a sausage basically can’t wait for the day that he gets inside a bread roll called Brenda who is his girlfriend and they even just preempt things by just touching tips.

But all is not well when Honey Mustard comes back from the great beyond and tells everyone what the gods do to the food when they reach the great beyond. When they all get picked by a god, Honey mustard basically commits suicide and in the process separates our heroes from said god and the paradise they believed they were going to. They also stop Douche, a feminine hygiene from reaching the Great Beyond, and because his nozzle is broken and he’s discarded, Douche becomes the main villain, juicing up whenever he can to exact his revenge.

Frank wants to find out the truth and along with a bagel and a lavash, who shall we say are at each other’s throats for reasons which at no point resemble the middle east conflicts….honest… the adventure unfolds before our very eyes.

My god……they’re mimicking the startled expressions of sex dolls….

There are some outstanding moments within the film, some of which would be a shame to spoil here, all I will say further is wait till the battle of the supermarket at the end, and also just how meta this film can get. The characters also are quite humorous including Selma Hayek playing a lesbian taco and Gum, who becomes basically a Stephen Hawking type character who fashioned a wheelchair after being discarded. The metaphor for religion and questioning beliefs as the story, is actually a pretty neat idea to use as a narrative within this film and remarkably there is a message about respecting beliefs, albeit a flimsy one probably to mock how Disney does it at the end of their films a lot of the time.

That said, I actually laughed less than I did during the Mechanic:Resurrection film earlier this week, which is strange as this is supposed to be a funny film and that certainly wasn’t. I suppose the over-reliance on stereotypes and smut did bring the thing down a bit in my eyes. There will also be some jokes which go past your head if you’re not 100% up on American culture and the news. Whether or not any of it would work again on a second viewing would also be debatable. I also suspect you will groan at the Nazi food jokes where they want to eliminate all the juice…. I know I did.

But in essence, this was still an enjoyable romp through a surprisingly thought out story with decent voice acting, some excellent moments and therefore I’d be happy to tell people to go see this when they can, just ensuring that the brain is switched to around 50% use and maybe while being drunk.

Sadly after release, it appears that there was also some news posted online about some comments from the animators at Nitrogen Studios worked under poor conditions and were forced by director Greg Tiernan to work overtime without pay. Whether or not this is true is eyebrow raising and something I hope is resolved as they all did a good job on this and they deserve to be properly compensated.

Right, I’m off to enjoy my own sausage party in my kitchen where I’ll murder some bread and ketchup in the process.