Most of the jokes hinge on tossing modern sensibilities against a Western landscape and pointing out how nasty, filthy, and dirty that world is despite all the Hollywood romanticism. Some work, some don’t and if you don’t laugh at any specific joke you only have to wait a few seconds for the next one to arrive.
The script is essentially collection of running gags.
#A million ways to die in the west how to
MacFarlane will never be considered an unconventional storyteller or a comedian with a message, but he sure knows how to stage an A+ diarrhea gag and you’ll get one of those and more here. It’s all pretty stock Western stuff with some nerd love wish fulfillment tossed in for good measure. Then around the edges there’s a subplot involving a virgin Giovanni Ribisi and his hooker girlfriend Sarah Silverman, a second villain in a mustache -sporting Neil Patrick Harris as Seyfried’s new beau, and numerous cameos from MacFarlane’s famous friends like Bill Maher, Ryan Reynolds, Ralph Garman, and, oddly, Ewan McGregor. She also has an evil cowboy husband played by Liam Neeson, so there’s a villain built right into the A plot. It all hinges on Charlize Theron, a wise cracking dame who has a way with a gun and for some reason decides to teach MacFarlane how to be a hero, love himself, and fall in love with a delightful gal like herself.
#A million ways to die in the west movie
He starts the movie on a low purely so that he can rise up through the most basic of hero’s journey plot devices. MacFarlane stars as a lowly sheep farmer who is hated by his community for being a chicken and freshly dumped by his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) for similar reasons. The plot is standard Western fare, just structure for a punch up session by MacFarlane, his Ted writing collaborators (Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild), and presumably a vast swab of the Family Guy and American Dad writing staff. He’s using the Western just as a clothes line to hang jokes onto and thankfully he’s pretty good at that. For a moment it feels like MacFarlane might have a genuine affinity for the genre and desire to dabble in homage, but that goes away pretty much instantly. The film opens with some genuinely stunning shots of Monument Valley, the place John Ford and countless other classic Western directors made iconic decades ago. That’s what he does after all and he does it well. Yet, while Brooks’ movie remains genuinely shocking, groundbreaking, and button pushing, Seth’s Western comedy is just a pleasantly filthy distraction. The genre is slowly coming back after the twin box office hits of True Grit and Django Unchained and obviously Mel Brooks’ classic Blazing Saddles made the genre a go-to comedy zone 40 years ago.
So, good ol’ Seth taking on the western in A Million Ways To Die in the West is more of an inevitability than a radical departure and it plays very much like an extended episode of one of his cartoons. His work can be damn funny, and even though Family Guy has been at the center of pop comedy for a decade, his work still somehow qualifies as a guilty pleasure. He’s smart without ever daring to make a statement through comedy, edgy without ever really making audiences uncomfortable, prolific without ever becoming a universally respected comedy institution, and successful without ever delivering a canonical classic. At this point, the Seth MacFarlane comedy formula is so set in stone that you can probably decide whether or not you like his latest offering before pointing even a single eyeball at it.
0 kommentar(er)
