SAUSAGE PARTY (Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan). 88 minutes. Opens Friday (August 12). See listing. Rating: NNN
Starting out as a foul-mouthed riff on Toy Story and ending up someplace very, very different, Sausage Party will likely be remembered more for what it says than how it says it, but thats not the worst thing you can say about a movie.
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldbergs first venture into animation is a decidedly R-rated adventure about a supermarket filled with sentient, foul-mouthed food items that spend their time planning to bang each other once theyre liberated from their packaging.
But just as This Is The End took the Rapture seriously while surrounding it with dick jokes, Sausage Party is really about the existential crisis of a hot dog named Frank. Voiced by Rogen (of course), Frank like his fellow comestibles believes he exists to be chosen by gods and transported to the paradise they call the Great Beyond.
When events conspire to separate Frank and his beloved bun Brenda (Kristen Wiig) from their friends, their journey leads to an unwanted enlightenment about the nature of their faith and the horrific truth that waits beyond the aisles. (To keep things from getting too heavy, our heroes are also being stalked by a raging douche voiced by Nick Kroll.)
The food puns have diminishing returns, as does the endless, not especially inventive cussing, and while it seems like a cheap shot to say the whole thing feels like something Rogen, Goldberg and co-star Jonah Hill came up with while baked out of their minds and staring into an open refrigerator, well, it really does feel like that especially in the final sequence, which tries for metaphysical resonance but just disappears up its own butt.
That said, they deserve full marks for taking the running gag about the bagel and lavash who start out as rivals but discover theyre not so different after all to its logical end point.
