A Million Ways to Die in the West

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane follows up his début feature--the surprisingly winning, raunchy, rom-com Ted (2012)--with the Western spoof A Million Ways to Die in the West. This time out, MacFarlane also plays the lead in the movie, which is its first major problem. Not that MacFarlane is unpleasant to watch on screen (if you enjoy his brand of humor), but his bland features and overweening personality can’t carry a feature-length picture. He’s far better doing his signature character voices or playing a supporting role, as he did with the titular animated bear in Ted. But the bigger issue with this movie is that the Western is virtually impossible to successfully spoof. Even Mel Brooks, whose Blazing Saddles (1974) is the only film to pull off an effective satire of the genre, abandons his Western parody and goes meta in the third act when his characters break free from their story (and the genre) and invade the Hollywood studio where their film is being made. 

Countless movies, like There Was A Crooked Man (1970), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Lust in the Dust (1985), Rustler’s Rhapsody (1985), Wagons East (1994), and Shanghai Noon (2000), have tried to lampoon cinema’s oldest genre with uneven to abysmal results. Part of the difficulty is that the Western isn’t really an active style of filmmaking anymore. With only a small handful of legit, non-revisionist Westerns made in the past four decades, there aren’t many actors around that we associate with the genre. And ever since Airplane and the other Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker films defined and perfected the spoof-movie, it’s been clear the best way to satirize a type of film is by using actors that are actually part of (or at least feel like they could be part of) the style that’s being made fun of. 

MacFarlane finds a novel way around this problem in that he doesn’t actually mock the Western genre with this new film. Instead, he gets his laughs by pointing out how bleak and unpleasant life must have really been in the 1800s, as opposed to the romanticized notions about the old West we all have from movies and literature. Thus his title, A Million Ways to Die in the West, refers to how much more likely it was at this time in history to die from snakebite, cholera, or a visit to the local sawbones, than at the hand of a gunslinger. As much as I appreciate this approach, and enjoy the way MacFarlane is able to mix his usual dick-and-fart-style humor with less puerile jokes about sheep farming, Stephen Foster, and daguerreotype photography, there just isn’t enough humor to be mined from this material. A spoof movie needs to deliver a decent chuckle about every two minutes, and a big laugh at least every ten minutes to succeed. Otherwise it simply becomes an exercise in making empty references and observations.