An American Pickle Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

2. It's A Simplistic Social Satire

At its core, An American Pickle is a satire of modern America, using the whole "pickled in brine for 100 years" shtick to underline how absurd the United States in 2020 truly is.

For the most part the film's satirical through-line is really quite shallow, taking easy pot-shots at modern conveniences we take for granted, from seltzer machines to fridges and the iPad.

There's also a good deal of shade thrown at consumerism and humanity's general wastefulness, not to mention hipster culture, our optics-obsessed society, and of course, social media.

Unsurprisingly, Rogen eventually carves out a decent chunk of the film to take some thinly-veiled jabs at Donald Trump and his populist platform, which while certainly relevant, doesn't really add anything fresh or clever to an already overdone conversation. Trump sucks, who knew?

Though the setup clearly offered fertile ground for a biting, angry satire about American immigration policy and the generally fraught state of the U.S. today - if not the world - in the end it just isn't clever enough conceptually to be truly effective.