A Million Ways to Die in the West

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.

The problem with this film is that it didn't actually appear to understand what it wanted to be. In places it is romantic comedy, in others it is action drama, in others it is part Adam Sandler comedy, but mostly it's just a collection of crude and unfunny frat boy jokes. I am amazed the movie failed the way it did, because it has a lot of star power, and a decent budget behind it - but then I guess it just goes to show that just because you can succeed in one medium, that doesn't always mean you are automatically capable of doing the same in every medium. Probably one of the biggest flaws in this film is that not only does the main character's frame of reference make absolutely no sense, but it's also inconsistent throughout the film. MacFarlane plays a character who spends the entire movie showing how enlightened he is by complaining about how terrible life in the West is - but he could only know this if he had experienced life AFTER that period, and therefore had something to compare it with. For someone living in that actual period, things would have actually seemed quite advanced, compared to what had gone before, and with all the technological developments and political innovations taking place during that actual period. And then later in the film, MacFarlene's supposedly enlightened and modern-thinking character suddenly reverts back to making jokes about the American Indian people (something someone of his period is likely to do), but then later still he actually gets adopted by an Indian tribe because of his enlightened approach to Indian/American relations. I would also suggest that his jokes about "Black men" and their body preferences in women, and the Islamic "death chant" were grossly demeaning, if not racist. And don't get me started on the montage towards the end of the film, which largely felt like a series of skits that didn't fit anywhere else in the movie, so they jammed them pointlessly into the montage because they didn't have the good sense to know they weren't actually that funny. All in all it was a confused effort that just wasn't that good.