Sausage Party Review

The concept is better than the marketing suggested. This is a film about faith as a coping mechanism, built to argue that the comforting story exists because the truth is unbearable, and critics who came for shock were surprised to find an actual thesis under it. The joke rate is high, the voice cast commits, and Edward Norton's neurotic bagel and Nick Kroll's villain are the standouts.

The satire lands hardest when it stops being about food and starts being about how believers treat each other. The reservations pile up around the execution. The animation is cheap and stiff even by the standards of the house style it is parodying, faces move badly and the supermarket has no depth. The ethnic caricatures used to stage the religious conflict are broad enough that a good share of reviewers stopped laughing, and the notorious final sequence pushes so far past its point that it reads as endurance rather than transgression.

Reporting after release about working conditions on the animation did the film no favors. What remains is a real idea, delivered loudly, in a package that undercuts it about as often as it serves it.