Seth MacFarlane specializes in Whitman's Samplers of comedy. Keep digging, and sooner or later you'll find a joke you enjoy.
Unfortunately, in the case of "A Million Ways To Die In The West," he plays to an audience of mostly diabetics.
Hot off his smash 2012 directorial debut "Ted," "A Million Ways" sports all the makings of a passion project for MacFarlane - the sort of sprawling, big budget comedy he can make after earning so much money directly out of the gate. Why else cast himself as the leading man, in addition to directing and co-writing, after a 15 year career spent largely behind the scenes?
Because he can, that's why. Not to knock the guy. That he took this long to step in front of the camera, after spending much of his 30s doing everything else, shows impressive restraint. And he needn't have worried anyway. As a movie star, he brings a completely nonthreatening presence. He doesn't spin gold, but he doesn't embarrass himself either. The same sort of effortless charm you'd expect this deep in a career whose success is rather remarkable considering how many comedy fans fantasize about his head on a stick.
His entire career is really an exercise in conundrums. Does he want to be an old school ENTERTAINER, telling consciously lame one-liners and crooning the standards with utmost sincerity? Does he want to swim in the shallow wading pool of shit and dick jokes? Or possibly be the savior of intellectualism in modern America, blending low and high comedy with aplomb (anyone who's caught him on "Real Time With Bill Maher" knows he ain't no slouch, brains-wise)?
Such questions extend to "A Million Ways." It's a movie that can't decide quite what it wants to be, so it decides to be nothing. As said, MacFarlane stars as Albert, a cowardly sheep farmer in an upstart 1882 Arizona town whose girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried in a nothing role that exists purely to spark conflict) leaves him after he backs out of a duel. Soon she's in the arms of another man, local mustachioed gentleman Foy (Neil Patrick Harris, twirling his 'stache to utmost evil glee), leaving a distraught Albert to wallow in the misery that is the Old West. All until the mysterious and beautiful Anna (Charlize Theron). She's beautiful. She's an expert gunslinger. She also falls for MacFarlane, because MarFarlane made the movie.
All this plus she's the wife of feared outlaw Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson, tearing into his underwritten role with the menace of a professional actor doing his job). Does Albert get the girl? Does he face his fears and learn to unload a firearm?
No prizes for guessing. You know how this ends. We all know how this ends. That's not the point. Plot exists as a mere clothesline in a comedy such as this. And the problem isn't that MacFarlane (with cowriters Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild) brought nothing to hang. It's that he brought too much. For its ungodly 116 minute running time, "A Million Ways" is one shockingly undisciplined major summer release. Any single ten minute chunk might contain a shot of semen stuck to a prostitute's face, a brassy song-and-dance number that brings the movie to a halt as Harris extols the virtues of mustaches, extended sweeps of frontier vistas that fill the 2.35:1 frame, a spot-on and legitimately witty reference to Stephen Foster, or a man shitting in not one but two hats. It awkwardly bounces between at least three different subplots with zero structure, all of them just sort of happening until the other one happens.
There's no rhyme or reason to "A Million Ways." It boasts all the laser focus of a visually impaired child set loose in the bumper cars for the first time. Given MacFarlane's clear antipathy for the plot, one wonders if he would have preferred to ditch everything and shoot an outright sketch comedy. What's particularly frustrating is the ingredients are here for any number of individual good movies if he just chose a path and stayed on it.
MacFarlane shows clear intoxication with the idea of making a western, and indeed, he and cinematographer Michael Barrett shoot the everloving mess out of Monument Valley, John Ford's favorite playground. Genuinely well-framed landscape shots. Helicopter sweeps that work overtime. Granted, a great deal of the major seems to be owed to color correction in the editing room, but the pieces remain. As a director, though, MacFarlane tends to linger on these epic elements a bit too long, meaning they oddly clash with the more intimate story he's telling, almost mocking the decidedly un-epic nature of his final product.
Then the gross out gags, which he employs ready and willing. He just doesn't know how to sell them. There's the old rule in comedy best exemplified by the Sideshow Bob rake scene on "The Simpsons" (or, to be more apropos, the campfire in "Blazing Saddles"): If you pull a stupid gag, it starts off stupid, but if you're willing to keep going, the laughs come from sheer "Oh my god, they're still doing this" nerve. You build and build to a moment of perfect desperation, then (this is key) you get out. MacFarlane knows a stupid gag as well as anyone, but he's yet to master the fine art of knowing when to stop. Maybe we'll see a sheep's erect penis and that's the entire joke because, hey, sheep penis. Or on the flip side, a poisoned Neil Patrick Harris will suffer severe diarrhea in a scene that flatly goes on...and on...and then on again.
Finally, the real tragedy: "A Million Ways To Die In The West" fails to live up to its basic premise. Portraying the Old West as an awful, desolate place full of misery is an inspired concept - not since Warren Beatty failed to open a whorehouse in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" has the western been so devoid of heroism. Too bad MacFarlane continually forgets this, and outside of a hilarious early monologue in a bar and an amusing trip to the county fair, it's a well he visits too few and far between. In fact, for oddly long stretches, he seems to forget he's even making a comedy. Comedy, and I'm pretty sure this is a legal definition, has "jokes." MacFarlane and his writers are often content to coast on their defiantly anachronistic take on the 1800s, rendering "A Million Ways" less a comedy where people do and say funny things and more a comedy of attitude, where people only act funny.
TV sitcoms like MacFarlane's "Family Guy" and "American Dad" are a volume business. Bits of an episode, or even the entire episode, might flop, but that's OK - there will be more in the season. Feature length comedies aren't so lucky. This is their one chance. They require rigorous, brutal precision and pacing cut to the bone. If it loses its audience for too long, those negative feelings become palpable and the movie must work like hell to earn us back. "A Million Ways To Die In The West" contains moments of inspired lunacy (wait for great gags involving President Lincoln or an unfortunately named shooting gallery and mourn the kind of movie this could have been). But to watch it is to increasingly feel that we're in the hands of a filmmaker who doesn't know where he's going. We don't trust him, and we don't trust the film.
So many better ways, this movie could have gone. If only MacFarlane didn't undercut his better instincts.
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