Finally Sausage Party has arrived. Ever since the first trailer for Seth Rogen’s r-rated animated comedy dropped I’ve been so excited for this film. The trailer was brilliant, fresh, and hilarious.

And the film itself is… well, fine. There is always the worry when you see a trailer like this that the film won’t actually be able to sustain the idea for its full run time, and that was the case with Sausage Party. The story is incredibly flimsy, and the film was far more concerned with trying to fit as many jokes as they could into the film. After I saw the trailer I thought that they might try and go down almost a survival horror story, and that would have been brilliant. Instead I was disappointed with how much time was spent in the supermarket, which was the least funny part of the trailer.

But the big problem I had was that it just wasn’t really funny enough. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few big laughs in there, and some chuckles. This isn’t an unfunny movie. But given how good the trailer was, I wanted so much more. The novelty of seeing food swear and make sexual innuendos wore off exceedingly fast for me. Particularly when they open the movie by just swearing a lot. This will be quite a controversial film; they throw so many stereotypes in regarding people and cultures, that it looses its shock value, which was clearly the point. There were enough laughs for me to look positively on the film, but not enough to say it’s great.

What is great is the vocal talent attached to the film. As you’d expect with a Seth Rogen film a lot of his friends, and regular collaborators are there. James Franco, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and Paul Rudd all appear. But they also got actors like Selma Hayek, Kristen Wiig, Edward Norton, and David Krumholtz. That’s some exceptional talent behind this film and it shows, they all do excellent jobs. The animation isn’t as good as a lot of this year’s animated films, but given that it was made on a budget about a fifth of a Pixar or Disney film, that’s hardly surprising.

One of my favourite things in animated films is almost always the references to other well known films. Now Sausage Party is obviously a big send up of Pixar films such as Toy Story or Cars, and I loved the references to Pixar on the Druggie’s car. But the best thing about an R-rated animation is that it allowed it to make more adult references. As well as the obvious Saving Private Ryan one that was seen in the trailer there are great references to Top Gun, In The Heat of the Night, and Terminator 2. As a film lover I always adore these moments.

Sausage Party isn’t a bad film, but like much of this summer it was underwhelming and left me feeling a little disappointed. It has some hilarious and controversial moments that will live long in my memory, but it couldn’t sustain this across an entire hour and a half runtime. This is a film worth seeing, but it can’t live up to the brilliant trailer that really raised expectations.

6/10