A Million Ways to Die in the West

The DNA of one of America's noblest, and most classical, art forms, the Hollywood Western, runs completely contrary to juvenile, potty-mouthed humor.  For this reason, a comedy mashing together the two genres is likely to be either an ingenious masterpiece or a complete failure -- Seth McFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West is, lamentably, the latter.  McFarlane plays a hapless sheep farmer who despises the stunning, if arid, western territory where he is marooned -- it's too dangerous, he complains, with a million ways to die:  something illustrated by a number of garish and bloody accidental deaths throughout the film in the manner of the Final Destination franchise.  A fop steals the hero's girlfriend leading him to challenge the man to a duel.  A beautiful young woman, something of an Annie Oakley, teaches McFarlane to shoot a revolver and he humiliates his rival in the duel.  (His triumph involves laxative and results in several Stetson hats used as chamber pots and shown in close-up when filled with steaming diarrhea.)  By this time, the sheepherder has fallen in love with the comely lady shootist.  Unfortunately, she turns out to be married to the baddest of the bad hombres in the district, a gunfighter played by Liam Neeson, snarling and spitting like Jack Palance. There are some showdowns, horse chases, and a scene involving peyote, Indians, and levitating sheep.  In the end, McFarlane gets the girl.  The movie is mildly amusing and has a half-dozen halfway decent gags.  The conventions of the Western, the old tropes of barren landscape and figures on horseback, clearly interested the filmmaker and his crew far more than the perfunctory plot and its tepid jokes.  There are a couple of stirring scenes of men on horseback galloping across open country and a number of shots staged in Monument Valley are almost surrealistically beautiful.  Indeed, McFarlane lights his desert village and the sheepherder's homestead romantically, pools of golden, glowing firelight against vast starry skies.  The viewer has the sense that McFarlane, who thinks himself too laid-back and modern to make a Western, would, in fact, rather just succumb to temptations implicit in this material and produce a straight B-Western movie.  But no such luck.  A lot of talent has been assembled for this movie -- it features Bill Maher, Gilbert Gottfried, Sarah Silverman, and a number of other worthy performers, all of them wasted or given sophomoric obscenities to mouth. The two principals are completely miscast.  Seth McFarlane is completely wooden, uninspiring, and somnolent as the leading man -- he seems scarcely awake at times and he is not, by any reasonable standard, a handsome fellow:  unfortunately, McFarlane seems vain and, unlike Woody Allen, for instance, doesn't highlight his unprepossessing appearance for laughs.  In fact, he seems to think that he is another Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart.  Charlize Theron, the heroine, looks so tall, supernaturally skinny and long-legged, that she seems to be an entirely different species of human being, completely unreal in shape and appearance and totally unsuited for the film.  The love scenes between these two mismatched players are excruciating to behold.