SiftPop

I just feel bad for the people who meant to buy tickets to Million Dollar Arm.

——-

“A Million Ways to Die in the West” is the latest movie from uber producer Seth MacFarlane, the mind behind animated shows like Family Guy and movies like the Mark Wahlberg teddy bear comedy “Ted”.  He’s known for material that is crass, sophomoric,  full of pop culture references, and sometimes downright hilarious.  So does this wild west version of MacFarlane chug down those same tracks? For the most part, sure, though I think much less successfully than many of his other outings.

——-

Let’s hit the positives first. Let’s see, Neil Patrick Harris is of course good, there are some really fun cameos, and you know what? I actually enjoyed seeing Seth himself on screen.  Usually he’s doing a voice or just behind the scenes writing and producing.  But he took a full on acting part in this one and wasn’t completely awful.  I mean, he’s not putting on an acting clinic or anything, but he held up ok.  One of the reasons for that is that he basically wrote a part that was him as if he had time traveled back to the old west.  While many of the other characters seemed to be people of their time, Seth’s character, Albert, was very much a modern man stuck in the 1800s.  And I think that conceit worked for the most part. Plus he understands his role. There’s a line in this where someone calls him a hero and he replies, “No, I’m not the hero, I’m the guy that makes fun of the hero’s shirt”.  He gets that he’s not doing anything world changing here, he’s just out to gross people out and make them laugh, and that self deprecation is probably the best thing about the movie, keeping us from ever taking anything too seriously.  Of course the downside of that is that any heart or drama the movie tries to enact falls flat as well.

——–

I mean, I actually like that Seth tries to inject his raunchfests with some meaning, and I think it actually worked in the movie “Ted”.  That movie was surprisingly touching, but here any of the more heartfelt moments or dramatic tension just don’t work because the movie has taught us that nothing in this world is real or truly valuable. It also makes the movie feel incredibly boring through stretches and at 2 hours you walk out feeling like at least 30 minutes of the movie was story filler. Of course the worst thing is that we are this far into talking about a comedy and I haven’t felt the need once to mention how funny it is.  I mean, it’s not that none of these jokes land, I certainly found myself amused and smiling now and again, but overall I’d say they landed at about a 20% success rate.  Of course much of this will come down to whether or not you dig MacFarlane’s patented brand of crassness, which is often both intellectual and infantile. I think it’s likely because it veers much more towards the later in this one that it just didn’t work for me overall.  Plus, I have to be honest. some of the racial stuff in this just feels downright icky.  I get it, its a take down of how awful the 1800s were in that regard, but still, in a comedy like this, to get laughs out of it, I didn’t like it.

——–

Overall, A Million Ways to Die in the West is a comedy that is only occasionally funny. Seth MacFarlane’s laid back approach makes for a likeable enough lead, but steals any depth the movie might have eventually developed.  I give it a C-.

——–

Thanks for checking out this Your Movie Friend review, stay tuned for this review’s “Best Ever” challenge here in bit but first, I’m going to put up some stuff you can click over in this area. If you’d like to subscribe, which I would much appreciate, you can do so by clicking the big gray subscribe button.  Want to see more?  Well, Maleficent is out this week so you can click here to see my review of that.  You can also Click the logo up here to go to the all new yourmoviefriend.com where you can find a searchable database of reviews as well as the written text of these videos. And finally this review’s “Best Ever” Challenge, where you name the best movie ever in a particular category and also try to identify my choice. What is the “the best western comedy ever”. I’m partial to the one that had a little bit of Asian flare to it.  Drop your own answer and a guess at mine in the comments and first person to guess mine gets a point! Thanks and please subscribe!