Ha. He’s holding a sheep. Ha!
It’s 1882. Seth plays Albert Stark, a gormless sheep farmer and general wuss, left standing slack jawed when his pretty young girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) leaves him for a real man with a mustache (Neil Patrick Harris).
Albert’s best friend Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) implores him to look elsewhere, to move on. This despite the fact that Edward and his girlfriend Ruth (Sarah Silverman) haven’t ‘sealed the deal’ yet, even though Ruth is a saloon hooker with legs that should hang a sign saying ‘Open all Hours’. This concept alone is allegedly so funny that it is dragged out again and again and…
But Albert opts to remain pining and tending his sheep, until circumstances demand otherwise.
A Million Ways to Die in the West is all over the shop. It adheres to the dogged authenticity of the Old West with all of the passion of a teenager working a summer job in a theme park. One minute they’re trying to remain in character, the next they’re calmly pointing out the deficiencies and limitations imposed by the era on the citizens for ‘comic effect’.
For his part Seth seems to ramble on like Stewie improv-ing inanely. Live. Uncensored. Unfunny. For two hours. He is so dry, so dispassionate and so very matter of fact with his delivery that Bruce Lee would be moved to call his performance ‘the art of winking, without winking’.
When Charlise Theron and Liam Neeson appear among a group of rogues you wonder just how things might heat up for the better, alas they remain tepid, and we’re expected to go all doe-eyed as Charlise and Seth babble along at each other while Liam Neeson is positively wasted.
For his part Neil Patrick Harris at least tries bravely to create a character with charisma and energy. Then MacFarlane’s script demands that he shit in a hat.
And if you think it’s lazy to make a headline joke about #2s, then hang on to your hat, as there is another one about #1s as well.
Ultimately the film drags interminably across the all too long two hour running time. The script lacks wit and genuine jokes (See above: ‘shit in a hat’) and the plot is strangely lacking in the absurdity required to generate the wackiness demanded by such a silly concept. It’s like the script writers sat around saying ‘wouldn’t it be funny in the wild west? What with all the disease, premature death and dust?’ Then passed the notes off as a script and then had the actors say nothing more than that sentence. In endless dull variations. For two hours.
It isn’t helped that Seth MacFarlane is so far from a leading man that it isn’t funny. Watching him mug next to Theron like Jimmy Fallon does in his skits (“It’s funny because I’M laughing and I’M IN IT!’, while an honest to goodness screen presence like Liam Neeson wastes away in the background is a crime.
Over the years it seems MacFarlane’s undeniable voice talents have written cheques his big pasty expressionless face simply can’t cash.
With zero inspiration and minimal perspiration, what we’re left with is the MacFarlane ‘Family Guy version of Trying’, namely utilizing his normal staple diet of controversial topics. Any rape joke is funny when you’re grinning right? And if a 45 second song about mustaches curls the lip during Family Guy, imagine how hilarious it would be for 3 minutes in a film? (The answer; not very.) But it’s hard to shoehorn an AIDS or date-rape joke into the Wild West no matter how hard you don’t try, especially when you don’t get to use your cutaways…
(Amazingly there are actually two cutaways in defiance of logic. One of them is actually pretty good.)
There might be a million ways to die in the West, but writer-director Seth MacFarlane could unfortunately think of half a dozen ways to make us laugh. And in two hours the chuckle to minute ratio is frankly Rob Schneideriffic.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. MacFarlane seems to have the ear – and cheque book – of Hollywood. Without a swearing bear though the jokes are thin on the ground.
