Million Ways to Die in the West Review

Reviews

A 1000000 Ways to Die in the West

Unexpected success often leads to creative disaster. With no ane there to edit his extreme tendencies, to tell him casting himself in the pb might be a mistake, to warn him that breezy comedies shouldn't be most 2 hours long, Seth MacFarlane'southward menu blanche that came with the box role success of "Ted" proves to be his undoing. The mistakes made in the production of "A 1000000 Ways to Dice in the West," reminiscent of the worst comedic tendencies of the Happy Madison crew, feel like a byproduct of a man-kid allowed to do whatever he wants because it worked last time. A failure on nearly every level, "A Million Ways to Die in the West" almost approaches so-bad-you-need-to-run across-it categorization. At that place are scenes/jokes that hit the dusty footing of Monument Valley with such a remarkable thud that no ane in the preview audience with whom I saw the film laughed. Not ane person. Which leads one to inquire, how did they make information technology through the editing/postal service-production procedure? As we so oftentimes inquire ourselves with awful comedies, did they actually think this was funny?

In the first of several bad decisions, the charmless MacFarlane (a talented author in the prime of "Family Guy" merely completely unengaging as a leading human being) plays Albert Stark, a sheep herder living in the dangerous fourth dimension of 1882 Arizona. As he points out repeatedly—MacFarlane never wrote a joke he only wanted to tell once—Stark'south globe is a deadly one. Cholera, wolves, gunslingers, delinquent bulls, exploding wink bulbs; there's always something to kill yous on the Wild Westward frontier. Written with the kind of meta sensation of what'southward happening around him that makes him experience similar a fourth dimension traveler, Albert is an antisocial, solitary guy, especially after his broad-eyed girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) leaves him for the daringly mustachioed Foy (film-stealing Neil Patrick Harris, who can do more with a raised eyebrow than MacFarlane tin with an entire monologue).

Albert's life changes when Anna comes to town. Played by Charlize Theron with a winsome charm that the moving-picture show doesn't deserve, Anna sees something in Albert, encouraging him to see how great he really is deep downwardly within, even though MacFarlane never wrote that into the character. Yeah, "A Meg Ways to Die in the West" is nigh a human being who gets dumped by one daughter only to have a beauty of Theron's caliber inexplicably fall head over cowboy boots for him. Information technology's a movie about how slap-up Albert is and nonetheless MacFarlane forgot to brand him interesting. I'd actually rather hang out with Louise and Foy. Or even buddy Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) and his prostitute girlfriend (Sarah Silverman), who don't have sexual practice fifty-fifty though she sleeps with a dozen guys a day and schedules appointments for anal. Again, if you observe that joke funny, good news, it volition be repeated multiple times.

Anna has a secret: she'south actually the wife of the notorious Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson), a human being in black who is riding to town to…y'all know, I take no idea. MacFarlane can't even be bothered to really ready upward a motion picture that deconstructs the Western in any sort of narrative sense. He has too many piss jokes to tell. Don't become me wrong. I don't mind a bit of envelope-pushing when information technology comes to sense of taste in one-act only at that place's a departure between being edgy and just thinking that the word poop is inherently funny. And, worst of all, MacFarlane telegraphs every joke before he tells it. He's the kind of guy who is so in dearest with the punchline that he forgets the set-up. A fleck about a family unit not smile in a photo at the county off-white would be funnier if wasn't a repeat from ten minutes agone. Ditto a bit nearly quack doctors. Ditto everything after the offset scene with Ribisi & Silverman. The throwaway bits produce the picture'southward simply chuckles because they don't feel underlined, repeated, highlighted and accompanied by a neon sign begging yous to express mirth.

It doesn't help that MacFarlane brings goose egg filmmaking style to the film. Perhaps he was also distracted past his performance to notice that "A Million Ways to Die in the W" looks like a TV special. At that place were times where I was convinced that he was going for a purposefully constructed aesthetic like an former-fashioned Western and times where I think he was just existence lazy. Information technology doesn't take to look good, right? Equally long as we go people talking with our gross-out humor, everything else volition be forgiven, right? Did you hear the one most the writer/managing director whose success blinded him to what people liked about his commencement motion-picture show? It's not that funny.