Substituting a plethora of fart jokes and sudden bull-goring for actual brains, the screenplay for A Million Ways To Die In The West runs the gamut from raunchy to silly. Though not as frequent as in Seth McFarlane’s previous film, Ted, the laughs here spew forth despite the film’s fits and starts. You may need a shower afterward, though.
McFarlane, who directed, co-wrote, and plays the lead, goes for a contemporary Blazing Saddles. Of course Mel Brooks never meandered with comedic loose ends and repetitive one-jokes like this. For every good laugh there soon follows a flat scene that dangles in mid-air. A running gag parodies prostitute Sarah Silverman and her milquetoast fiancé Giivanni Ribisi. They’re waiting until marriage to have sex–what a riot! Their mutually glib pronouncements of the situation are matched by McFarlane’s increased ramping up of the body fluids in what seems like an overboard repetition of basically the same scene.
McFarlane plays Albert, a sheep farmer who lives with his parents. His father, a total grinch, is another one of those one-joke ad nauseum characters. It’s almost worth waiting for a flashback scene where the old man scatalogically pranks his son with a tooth fairy/pillow stunt but by then I was totally sick of the guy. Then there is the mustache riff–personified by Neil Patrick Harris, who runs a mustache shop (who knew?) and runs off with McFarlane’s girl (Amanda Seyfried). An excuse is even found for Harris to do a song and dance number to–yes, Stephen Foster’s “The Moustache Song.”
An excellent Charlize Theron (you owe it to yourself to catch her performance in 2012’s Young Adult) shows up in time to save not only Albert but, it might be said, the film as well. Here she shows chops for comedy, playing Anna, the wife of tough gunfighter Clinch (Liam Neeson). For reasons that make little sense she is in town for awhile without her husband. Her male chaperone gets thrown in jail for shooting a cowpoke in a bar fight and Anna gets to latch onto a nice guy (Albert) for a change. Her actual identity as a gunslinger moll is unknown to Albert.
A male/female buddy movie moves along nicely until the inevitable return of Clinch–but not before Albert has a run-in with Native Americans and accidentally ingests too much of a psychedelic. It is then that we are given a glimpse of what this movie might have been. A brief phantasia scene temporarily erases the Elmer Bernstein-esque musical homages, John Ford-style vistas, and cheesy send-ups of The Wild West that preceded. Here’s hoping if there’s a sequel, it won’t be as solidly rooted in the same grimy reality as this landlocked spoof–as spinelessly exaggerated as it is exuberantly slimy.