A Mil­lion Ways to Die in the West

Hav­ing seem­ing­ly tired of recy­cling jokes for his long-run­ning ani­mat­ed sit­com, Fam­i­ly Guy, Seth Mac­Far­lane chanced his arm in 2012 by tak­ing a stab at direct­ing. Ted was a film that worked in spite of itself. Yes it was gim­micky, self-sat­is­fied and taste­less, but it boast­ed an unde­ni­able chem­istry between Mark Wahlberg and the epony­mous bad bear, thanks in no small part to MacFarlane’s superb vocal work. Yet Ted had more than charm and laughs — it had gen­uine heart.

In the inter­ven­ing years, MacFarlane’s pub­lic pro­file has been raised sub­stan­tial­ly by a string of prime­time guest appear­ances and awards cer­e­mo­ny host­ing gigs, not to men­tion his impas­sioned cam­paign­ing for gay rights. So much so that it’s now MacFarlane’s face that’s being used to mar­ket his unique brand of white teenage male humour. On the evi­dence of this woe­ful fol­low-up, how­ev­er, he should prob­a­bly have stuck to doing sil­ly voices.

What we have here is a lame van­i­ty project pack­aged as a knock­about west­ern that’s actu­al­ly a corn­ball rela­tion­ship dra­ma in which, you guessed it, Seth gets the girl. It’s essen­tial­ly a stock guy-meets-girl yarn propped up by a series of non-jokes — the fea­ture-length equiv­a­lent of a stand-up’s awk­ward pause-for-laugh­ter at the end of a mis­judged rou­tine, or an ​’80s sit­com with the laugh­ter track tak­en off, where painful silences are pur­pose­ly cre­at­ed and then filled in spu­ri­ous­ly self-dep­re­cat­ing fash­ion by, yep, MacFarlane.

His char­ac­ter, a low­ly lovestruck sheep farmer named Albert, is sup­posed to be the com­mon schmuck we’re all root­ing for in a tum­ble­weed town full of cretins, whores and mur­der­ers, but his unbear­ably smug demeanour makes him fun­da­men­tal­ly unlike­able. It doesn’t help, of course, when you can’t shake the sense that Seth MacFarlane’s biggest fan is Seth Mac­Far­lane. Even the pri­ma­ry sup­port cast of Char­l­ize Theron, Aman­da Seyfried, Liam Nee­son, Gio­van­ni Ribisi and Sarah Sil­ver­man don’t appear to be hav­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly good time in his company.

The irony of A Mil­lion Ways to Die in the West is that, in pro­mot­ing him­self to lead­ing man sta­tus, Mac­Far­lane has inad­ver­tent­ly become the punch­line. Pitch­ing your­self as an equal oppor­tu­ni­ties offend­er is all good and well, but in order to keep audi­ences sweet you’ve got to offer them gags that actu­al­ly work, even if it’s on the broad­est, most dumb­ed-down lev­el imaginable.

Most sur­pris­ing is how tame the film is. Which is not to say that Mac­Far­lane doesn’t rel­ish tak­ing rou­tine pops at Chris­tians, Jews, Mus­lims, Native Amer­i­cans, African Amer­i­cans and blue-col­lar Amer­i­cans, more that he only does so after wear­ing out every but­ton on the indus­tri­al-size flat­u­lence sound­board he pre­sum­ably had cus­tom-made for the film. The result is com­pa­ra­ble to watch­ing a grown man gig­gle inces­sant­ly at his own bow­el move­ments for two sol­id hours. If only Mac­Far­lane knew just how much his shit stinks.