Since this isn't going to be a very long review I'll just cut right to the chase: I was really looking forward to this film. This might sound weird coming from someone whose favorite films of each year tend to be along the lines of Boyhood and Brooklyn, but I've actually liked quite a few of the comedies produced by Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg (This is the End and The Interview being two of my favorite comedies of the last five years) and I had heard really good early buzz coming out of its work-in-progress screening at the South by Southwest Film Festival as well as other advance screenings. And plus, I just thought the central premise was really fun and original for an animated film: What if our food had feelings? What if the food that sits in supermarkets around the world could talk and walk around and throw wild parties in the store after-hours? There's a lot of potential in that premise, and I really thought Rogen and Goldberg and their crew could do something creative with it, given their track record and their love of double entendres, while paying homage to the likes of Toy Story and A Bug's Life and Finding Nemo.
So, here's what they do with the premise: it's Fourth of July weekend at a Whole Foods-like supermarket called Shopwells. Our main character, a sausage named Frank who's packaged with others of his kind for Fourth of July sales next to neighboring buns, is enthusiastic about the possibility of being chosen by the "gods" (supermarket customers) to enter the "Great Beyond" (the customers' homes). Once Frank and his other sausages are chosen with a package of hot dog buns (which includes Brenda, a bun that Frank is infatuated with), it seems like everything's going to go great...until a jar of Honey Mustard in the cart (who we learned earlier was mistakenly purchased by one of the "gods" and is much less than enthused about his experience in the "Great Beyond") tells everyone in the cart that the Great Beyond is "bulls***" and kills himself by jumping from the cart and smashing on the floor. Frank, haunted by seeing this and being of the inquisitive type, is determined to go on an adventure to see whether there's any sort of truth behind Honey Mustard's statements on the "Great Beyond".
What follows is, to put it bluntly, an anti-religious parable disguised as an animated sex comedy. Yes, essentially the argument that Rogen and Goldberg metaphorically make in this film is that the whole concept of Heaven (or, in the film, the "Great Beyond") is a lie invented by humans to make themselves feel better about death. And while I am a practicing Christian, I have no problem with tackling religion from an angle I don’t personally agree with as long as they handle said subject with thoughtfulness and intelligence. But what this film essentially does is pound its atheistic message down the audience's throats so forcefully that the impact of much of the film's raunchy humor and double entendres (the kind that I loved in This is the End and The Interview) is blunted and didn't really register with me.
And on top of this, I also found it to be kind of lazy that literally all of the food talks in exactly the same profane way, so no one really sounds unique. Thankfully the voice cast does a good job at helping to differentiate the characters so they don't sound completely interchangeable, but I still just kept thinking, "Not ALL of these characters have to talk like this! Do they all have to drop f-bombs at every other word?!"
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