A Million Ways to Die in the West; or A million ways to tell the same joke.
Full disclosure: I am not a Family Guy fan. Or an American Dad fan. Or a fan of anything created by Seth McFarlane. In fact, I largely blame him for the awful trend of scripted non-sequitur television comedy where having no taste is an asset and no joke or situation has purpose beyond boasting of the writers’ knowledge. Certainly he is a smart guy, because he has figured out how to hoodwink whole swaths of the population with his lowest-common-denominator humor. I consider it a supreme laziness of vision and imagination to write the way he does, yet I suppose it takes some measure of talent to be a comedian who can convince people that having no unique perspective and writing jokes that never land, are repeated ad nauseum, and/or stolen from other writers, are the hallmarks of comic genius. The more I see of McFarlane’s work, the more I think South Park was somehow accurate with their depiction of his style as the product of manatees fishing out idea balls rather than a cogent, perceptive creative process.
But alas we do live in a world that validates his narcissistic, aimless approach, and this has led him to make another feature film enabling him to show off how much he knows about something (this time it’s Frontier myths and American identity), and still manage to have nothing to say. A Million Ways to Die in the West is a raggedy remix of Blazing Saddles and City Slickers with a loaded cast of Hollywood elite, all pleased as punch to have a spot in a McFarlane jag.
The plot of A Million Ways to Die in the West concerns the plight of a lowly sheep farmer/quivering coward named Albert (played by McFarlane), who is too smart for his own good and has grown disenchanted with the values and demands of Frontier life in the town of “Old Stump.” Unable to convince his girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfreid) to marry him, he has lost all hope of finding the courage to go for something more in a world where living past 30 and winning a duel are considered accomplishments of note. Luckily, a band of outlaws led by Liam Neeson (the one interesting casting choice) is headed through the region to give him an opportunity to prove his mettle. And even more luckily, the woman claimed as reluctant wife by this leader, Anna (Charlize Theron), is sent to Old Stump to lie low as he runs off to rob a stagecoach, or something to that effect. I’d tell you more, but you can already see where this is going. Unsurprisingly, everything works out for everyone we like, and those we don’t like have their asses handed to them (or have their asses explode with diarrhea, literally).
The plot is clearly a non-entity here. It’s a flimsy framework upon which McFarlane hangs a million jokes with the same punchline- the morals and culture of the Old West are fucked up because this culture lacks the technological or social advances we have now.
Million Ways to Die in the West