Movie Review: Sausage Party

Boring characters and a weak story undo a clever concept. This film is essentially “Toy Story,” but with food replacing the toys and constant R-rated humor. However, the characters her are more characterizations and stereotypes as opposed to anything original or interesting. There’s a whiney Jewish bagel and a Spanish taco in the main cast. There’s never any reason to care about any of them. Slightly more fleshed out, Frank the sausage and Brenda the bun carry no emotional weight. When something of significance happens, you never feel any empathy towards them. Too much is played for laughs. The plot is all over the place and never seems to find a grove. There are a couple of moments that are brilliant, but they never capitalize on those ideas and move on to the next joke. The humor is almost entirely sex jokes and foul language and is just never that funny when referring to pieces of food. The end is just bizarre and doesn’t fit the rest of the film.
** out of *****

Movie Review: Suicide Squad

Some fun characters and a little bit of heart make up for an uneven story and subpar action. The film is structured in a strange way. It starts off light with florescent colors and cartoon-like graphics. However, even with the humor, the rest of the movie is a bit darker. The main characters are introduced through hit-and-miss origin stories, or in some cases, just show up with little explanation on who they are. Will Smith puts on a good performance as Deadshot and plays up his conflicted nature. As expected, Margot Robbie nails the Harley Quinn character. She’s beautiful and sexy, but absolutely deranged. Even then, she brings a vulnerability that makes you care about her. Unfortunately, a rushed origin never allows us to understand her mental transformation. Viola Davis is also strong as the morally ambiguous Amanda Waller. You’re never quite sure if you should root for her or not. Jared Leto brings us a version of The Joker that we haven’t seen before. He’s physically intimidating, not to mention being a special kind of insane that borders on animalistic. Surprisingly, he seems unnecessary after the start of the film and could be cut out without changing the movie in any major way. The action scenes are fairly weak. There’s lots of shooting and punching waves after wave of generic bad guys. With all the colorful characters, they rarely do anything all that spectacular. And the main threat is so vague you don’t know what the main characters are even supposed to be trying to stop. There are a couple cool cameos from other DC characters, and there’s a bonus scene that appears mid-way through the credits.
***1/2 out of *****