Review of A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) by Juniord — 01 Jun 2014

While there were a couple things to make me smile in the film, the laughs, for me, were few and far between. A couple of the cameos were nice surprises, and Charlize Theron held her own in showing her comedic abilities, but many of the film's jokes felt forced and somewhat pretentious.

Macfarlane seemed far too interested in forcing his outrageous-for-the-sake-of-being-outrageous jokes onto the audience, practicing almost no true wit or any hint of subtlety. The majority of the lazy attempts at humor fell flat, and seemed to come off more-so as desperation.

Edgy humor has been and can be pulled off with much more grace. Macfarlane instead relies too heavily on simply blurting out the first thing to come to mind, no matter how half-baked a joke it may be, and flashes that all-too-aware grin while pretty much staring directly into the camera, somehow thinking that is enough to sell anything he says.

Overall, he only came off resembling a child who yells and breaks his crayons when he is trying to get a rise out of his parents. If he weren't so focused on his tries to upstage every other person in the film by attempting to show off the mountains of wit he appears to be under the delusion of possessing, this might have been a halfway decent comedy.

The landscape and many of the Western set pieces were beautiful, but otherwise, this film is largely a waste of the much more interesting supporting actors it contained (with Theron and Neil Patrick Harris, in particular, actually trying to do something different with their characters).

I now remember why I stopped watching Family Guy seasons ago.