Seth MacFarlane must think you’re stupid. For A Million Ways to Die in the West, his
second feature film, the creator of the nauseating cartoon Family Guy and the so-so R-rated teddy-bear comedy Ted has written and directed a Western
comedy that assumes you have only a passing familiarity at best with the genre
and with the history of the American frontier. The screenplay, a loose
collection of often ugly comedy conceits strung along a fairly standard Western
plot, is written from a detached angle to the material, filled with characters
who stand back and explain the context of the jokes. This is how a town in
Arizona got ice shipped from Boston. Here’s the level of medical care a
frontier town could expect. Did you know people don’t smile in old pictures? Did
you know there were a lot of deadly dangers in the Wild West? There’s a
condescension here that assumes you won’t get the jokes, such as they are. It’s
a movie made for people who snicker at old movies for no other reason than
because they’re from another time.
Stuck in approach somewhere between Lawrence Kasdan’s
grinning revival Silverado and Mel
Brooks’ anything-goes satire Blazing
Saddles, MacFarlane’s film is at once a smirking know-it-all comedy and a
somewhat earnest attempt to do a Western. The plot is simple. It’s 1882 in Old
Stump, Arizona. A poor sheep farmer (MacFarlane, giving himself the lead) is
left by his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) and soon starts courting the beautiful
stranger (Charlize Theron) who happens to ride into town. Unbeknownst to him,
she’s the wife of the region’s most terrifying gunfighter (Liam Neeson). That’s
the skeleton of a fine Western plot, and it’s carried along by expansive
widescreen photography from Michael Barrett and a classically trumpeting score
by Joel McNeely sounding a lot like what Max Steiner or Dimitri Tiomkin
would’ve done in the genre’s heyday. But every time a character speaks, it’s
with a clattering, colloquial modern speaking tone that’s ironic, smarmy, and
simply not funny.
Patient zero for this flat, desperately unfunny performative
patter is MacFarlane, who delivers his own writing with the enervating energy
of an overeager standup. He’s impressed with himself, convinced his subpar
quips and lazy observations are hilarious. He’s not charming. He’s smug. His
character is disconnected, standing aside from even his castmates. He’s given
long scenes in which he stands apart, mugging for the camera as he makes fun of
1800’s fashion, medicine, politics, transportation, and technology from a
vaguely know-something modern perspective, nothing a high school freshman who
half paid attention to history class couldn’t snark. It’s impossible to take
him seriously as a person in this story, which is too bad considering the
nearly two-hour movie has him in every scene. I simply couldn’t get invested in
a whiny, inconsistent character who is barely invested in the plot himself. He
keeps giving the whole production the side-eye, as if he knows more than he
does and feels so very self-satisfied about it.
Meanwhile, there are real actors around him who at times make
his (and Family Guy co-conspirators
Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild’s) repetitive and insulting writing seem almost
palatable. Theron’s a welcome presence, transforming a decorative plot device
into something like a character. Neeson for the most part retains his dignity,
assuming that’s a stunt butt that gets a daisy stuck in it, as he seemingly
gallops in from a serious Western. Elsewhere, Sarah Silverman and Giovanni
Ribisi are trapped in a gross-out subplot that plays like bad
knockoff Farrelly brothers, with a prostitute and her fiancé “waiting for
marriage,” but they almost make it work. The only person who gets the peculiar
tone of the picture exactly right is Neil Patrick Harris, playing a mustachioed
jerk wringing every bit of possible enjoyment out of his every appearance. He
has to play a scene where he suffers a fit of diarrhea in the middle of the
street, catching his runny excrement in his floppy cowboy hat. And he almost makes it work.
MacFarlane is a stunted, juvenile gag writer who expects to
get laughs out of edgy material, but fails to shape jokes with thought or
artistry. It’s a flat, stiff production that can barely set up a decent sight
gag. Characters are placed in front of the camera, barely move, and talk at each other in bad sitcom asides. Periodically they blurt out references to horrible subject matter – racism, misogyny, domestic
violence, murder, rape, child abuse – and MacFarlane assumes the shock will get a laugh.
The movie is casually dismissive and/or actively hateful to women, Native
Americans, African Americans, Chinese, Jews, and Muslims. Sometimes the racism
is cut with the smug white guy in the center of it all pulling
ain’t-I-a-stinker? faces. A “Runaway Slave” carnival shooting game has targets
that are big-lipped, wide-eyed blackface images chowing down on a slice of
watermelon. Two Chinese men wear rice-paddy hats and sport Fu Manchus. A
character jokes he’s going to recite his “Islamic death chant” and proceeds to
ululate gibberish.
You can’t have your aggressive stereotyping and hate speech
and wave it off, too. So what if (only sometimes) MacFarlane turns to another
character and says, “Um, isn’t that racist?” It is. But then what, exactly, are
we supposed to be laughing at? The movie comes across as stubbornly created
from the perspective of a narrow-minded, privileged, rich white male tittering
at anything beyond his immediate frame of reference. Words have meaning. Images
have power. MacFarlane knows what buttons to push, but fails to truly grapple
with, subvert, or defuse their impact. As director, he can barely stage a High
Noon shootout, saloon brawl, surreal drug trip, or musical number with any
clarity or consistency. No wonder he can’t even begin to figure out how to frame
or otherwise handle hot-button issues.
He wants laughs, and I truly believe you can craft a good
joke out of any topic, but he goes about it in exactly the wrong way. This is
comedy filmmaking at its most cheap, lazy, and unthinking. Are we supposed to
laugh because he went there, or does
he actually think he’s being clever? The writing is either offensive or
groan-worthy. The gross-out anatomical gags are just gross. Cameos (Christopher
Lloyd? Ewan McGregor? Ryan Reynolds?) are merely random nothings. The violence
is flatly presented and full of miscalculated gore. A face bloodily squished by
a brick of ice isn’t exactly a fun pratfall. At best, the movie is either
unfunny or incompetent, a pleasant and vacant experience. But when it’s bad, it’s
odious.
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