A Million Ways to Die in the West is essentially five minutes worth of stand up comedy on how the old West was a terrible place to live stretched out over the course of a 116 minute movie. Seth MacFarlane was clearly given the green flag to do whatever he wanted after the success of the sexually-charged anthropomorphic teddy bear movie Ted and he has come up with a whiff, most likely hurting the chances, once again, of the Western making any kind of true comeback.
Set in Arizona, 1882, the gist of the story is that Albert (MacFarlane), a lowly sheep herder, is dumped by his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) for Foy (Neil Patrick Harris), a dandy and owner of an establishment that sells mustache oils and wax. Albert is saddled with being a whiny, wimp of a character whose main reason for existence is to complain about the shitty era in time they are living in, making up for the bulk of the jokes over the film’s duration.
Anna (Charlize Theron), wife of the West’s most dangerous gunman, Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson), comes riding into town and to Albert’s rescue. While she may be married to a murderer, Anna is nothing like her villainous husband, whom we see shoot an old timer over a piece of gold at the beginning of the film. Instead she’s just a nice girl that, obviously, falls for Albert, doesn’t tell him she’s the wife of a murderous outlaw, helps him find out how great he is only to ultimately…. blah, blah, blah… you know where this is going because the film hardly has a plot as much as it gives reason to wedge in one joke after another. The only problem is, it’s just a repackaging of the same joke over and over. There may be a million ways to die in the west, and MacFarlane is sure to tell us as many of those ways as possibly, but he only appears to have one way of telling it.
The supporting characters are no better. Sarah Silverman plays a prostitute whose boyfriend (Giovanni Ribisi) has no problem with her having sex with 15-20 men a day just to earn a little cash. “My job isn’t very good either,” he says. The kicker, they haven’t had sex. Get it! They’re saving themselves for marriage because they’re both Christian. But, but, but… she’s having sex… Yeah, you get it.
Then there’s Patrick Harris’ character, whom we aren’t meant to like (because no one would) given his uppity ways, so we’re meant to revel in his pain as he has diarrhea in a cowboy hat just moments before a gun fight. But wait, not in just one hat, two hats! Two for the price of one! Then we watch a sheep pee directly in Albert’s face, Ribisi has to wipe semen off Silverman’s face (you know, because she’s a big ol’ whore) and on and on it goes.
I’m not saying I didn’t laugh at all. Some of the jokes are funny and MacFarlane has clearly been studying the work of Edgar Wright when it comes to directing comedy and delivering his punchlines, but he forgot to surround his jokes with a story and if I’m merely watching just for raunchy poop and semen humor you’re not going to maintain my attention for long. Even a stand-up comedian has more of a story to his/her jokes than this movie has, the key is those stand-up jokes last about five minutes, not an hour and 56 minutes.
I did, however, enjoy the sheep on the roof gag (primarily because it’s played straight), the conversation between Anna and Albert while fearing a Diamondback rattlesnake, the sit down with the Native Americans and more than a few other jokes. But that’s all these were, just random jokes interspersed throughout and tied to virtually nothing.
I wasn’t much of a fan of MacFarlane’s Ted, which beat its jokes into the ground to the point they were no longer funny, and this one does the same thing only it does so within the first 5-10 minutes. Beyond that I was just waiting for it to end.
