A Million Ways to Die in the West

After finding tremendous success with animated sitcoms Family Guy and American Dad, Seth MacFarlane ventured into the realm of live-action comedy with 2012's smash hit Ted, which featured Mark Wahlberg as a slacker whose best friend is a sex-and-drugs-obsessed teddy bear. While MacFarlane provided the voice and motion capture for the titular stuffed animal, he never actually appeared in the film, but takes center stage in his sophomore effort, A Million Ways to Die in the West.

Set in Arizona in 1882, the film stars MacFarlane as Albert Stark, a mild-mannered sheep farmer living a mundane existence in the rough and tumble town of Old Stump. Stark has just lost his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) to a wealthy local businessman (Neil Patrick Harris), and spends his days drinking away his sorrows with his best (and seemingly only) friend Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) and his prostitute fiancée, Ruth (Sarah Silverman).

Meanwhile, notorious outlaw Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson) has dispatched his wife to Old Stump to await his arrival while he and the rest of the gang pull off another stagecoach robbery. After a chance encounter during a bar fight, Anna (Charlize Theron) takes an immediate liking to Stark, and agrees to help him win back the heart of his lost love, but omitting her true identity could have grave consequences when Clinch discovers who she's spending her days with.

While the plot sounds like it could have come from any number of Western films, everything that occurs on screen is through the filter of MacFarlane's unique sense of humor. Simultaneously poking fun at genre tropes while also paying homage to the classics, A Million Ways to Die in the West offers plenty to laugh at, including a hilarious song and dance number about men's facial hair, and an absurd variety of comedic death sequences.

Unfortunately, these moments are overshadowed by the fact that most of the film's humor is derived from the sort of R-rated content that MacFarlane can't get away with on television. There are only so many jokes about semen, diarrhea, and homosexuality that an audience can absorb before these topics stops being funny, but the film continues well past that mark, with Silverman coming across as particularly grating. After years of the exact same schtick, haven't people grown tired of hearing her talk about her vagina?

MacFarlane has proved time and again that he can write intelligent, thought-provoking comedy, but much like his previous film, he seems far too willing to cast that aside in favor of dick jokes and lame attempts to be offensive and shocking, just for the sake of being offensive and shocking. A Million Ways to Die in the West isn't a bad film - indeed, I think it's a vast improvement over Ted - but it's still not the MacFarlane film that I had hoped for. He's better than this, and hopefully we'll see that in his next flick.

-- Brent Hankins, www.nerdrep.com

I seem to be in the minority here and probably a different age group, the upper one. Raised on westerns, my favourite source of drama in films, I have avoided this movie because of poor reviews and poor box office. I watched it last night, mainly to see Charlize Theron and was amazed how much I loved it. It opened with majestic scenes of what I took to be Monument Valley, used to such great success by John Ford in his classic westerns with John Wayne. My thoughts went almost immediately to Blazzing Saddles for comparisons, although it is much cruder but I'm used to that now in modern entertainment. Strangely I don't usually like vulgarity in humour but for some reason I overlooked it in this movie. That may be due to the likeable performances from Seth MacFarlane and Theron. Amongst all the sillyness is a completely straight performance by Liam Neeson playing his best violent persona which is another reason why I found it worked. I never realised MacFarlane was the same actor who made Ted, which I really didn't like and for me the crude humour in that was everything I don't like about modern entertainment. Why I forgave him that for this picture is a riddle. Still, I really didn't want this film to finish. I loved the relationship build-up between MacFarlane and Theron and the supporting actors, the violent gags and the cinematography were terrific. Perhaps you have to be an old time western fan to enjoy and sadly it's a bygone genre to modern audiences judging by other comments here. 9 stars from me for the most entertaining movie of the year for me so far.

I've sometimes enjoyed watching Family Guy and actually even enjoyed Ted. Reading the reviews on this movie made me not go see it in theaters, but I am satisfied with my choice to finally watch and to have given it a chance. Because of this, this is my first review posted on years of being on this site.

Seth knows his niche and the audience the directs his work towards. It was nice to have a genuinely funny movie that falls in line with the sense of humor I expected.

If you don't like his regular work, I don't recommend it, but if you do, you'll probably enjoy.

Don't rely on the reviews you read here! I didn't read the reviews prior to watching the movie, i really enjoyed it, it was fun and light comedy kinda movie and after watching it i took a look on the reviews and i was really shocked to find most of them negative and giving low voting for the movie, which i found so odd! Really, its a good movie and i neither know Seth MacFarlane nor am i a fan of his nor have i seen any of his previous movies but the movie is great and he did his role in a perfect way Watch the movie and judge for your self, i liked it and time passed so fast while watching that i couldn't even feel it! This movie encourage me to watch Seth MacFarlane's Ted and i am expecting it to be as good as this one.

First of all, I like MacFarlane's work and I am big fan of 'Family Guy', 'American Dad' and his previous live-action feature 'Ted', but 'A Million Ways to Die in the West' was set for being panned from the moment the trailer was unveiled. This is a real shame because the film does have some good aspects to it, at times it is evident that MacFarlane was trying to pay homage to some of the original westerns but at other times he was trying too hard to modernise a genre that didn't need it, and as a result the film was littered with grotesque sex jokes and toilet humour. Now don't get me wrong, I did chuckle a few times, but very few times at that. Liam Neeson's casting as the villain was indeed a good choice and he pulls off the role very well, especially alongside the stunning Charlize Theron in all her glory. I did enjoy the subtle references to 'Back to the Future' and 'Django Unchained', but despite these certain affluences, the film just generally lacked elsewhere and was unfortunately heavily flawed; a disappointing project from MacFarlane.