Review of A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) by Jesse O — 09 Nov 2014

I find it insane that this film's unrated cut is TWO HOURS AND THIRTEEN minutes long. You read that right, it runs over 130 minutes of your time. Seth McFarlane is reaching Judd Apatow levels of self-indulgence with that.

The reason this is impossible for me to believe is that the film, at a hefty 110+ minute runtime is already stretched thin enough as it is. It's probably one of the most scattershot films I've seen in recent memory.

It's all over the place, with twice as many misses as its hits. Seth McFarlane hasn't made his transition from TV to films a smooth one. Some people might have loved Ted, but that film was incredibly flawed.

I think Ted got by, for some people, because of the fact that it was a foul-mouthed teddy bear. If instead of a teddy bear, Ted was a human being, not nearly as many people would've liked it. I can guarantee that.

The film certainly had its moments, but it was way too inconsistent to truly be good. The problem with this movie, however, is the fact that it peaks about 45 minutes. If you noticed, this movie is almost 2 hours long.

So that means you have over an hour, 70 minutes to be exact, left in the movie. I think it's fair to say that your 2 hour movie shouldn't peak 45 minutes in. And it's not like the 45 minutes prior to that were great either.

They were as inconsistent as ever, but the best jokes are clearly in this part of the film. I think that if you're someone like a Vince Gilligan or David Chase, creators of Breaking Bad and The Sopranos respectively, the transition from TV to film should be much easier than someone whose show is known for its schtick rather than its storytelling abilities, as the aforementioned examples.

This film sees a lot of the same schtick-heavy style employed for its comedy. And since there's an R-rating attached to it, there's a lot more freedom, creatively, than Seth would've previously had on Family Guy.

The problem is that there really isn't much of a filter. Like if Seth, Alec Sulkin, and Wellesley Wild (writers of the film) thought something was funny then they left it in without an outside voice to help point out what was good or bad.

Then again, who knows if there actually was someone who filtered out the really bad stuff out of the script. That's a scary thing to think of actually. The ratio of good-to-bad jokes is about 1-to-3 and if that's the best they could do, I don't even want to think about what was actually left off the script because it wasn't good enough.

Because of that, and the fact that the film is needlessly long, it ends up wasting a really talented supporting cast. With people like Giovanni Ribisi, Sarah Silverman, Neil Patrick Harris, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried, just off the top of my head, you'd think the film would find a way to appropriately incorporate them into its story, but it doesn't.

There's long stretches of time where some characters don't even appear, making you forget their existence until they reappear. Just piss poor handling of characters. Terrible. And the thing is, the movie isn't that bad, up until Anna starts training Albert how to shoot, while incredibly inconsistent, it had some genuinely funny moments.

There was as many, if not slightly less, unfunny moments, but I got some laughs out of it. It's not that the film is completely unfunny after the 45 minute mark, it's just that there's more bad than good.

There's still a few chuckles here and there, but it's clear that this is a 90-minute movie stretched out to 2. It's just obvious that this film wasn't built from scratch to go this long.

I haven't actually spoken about the story itself, which is pretty lame as well. Generic 'guy falls in love with villain's wife'. I won't devote a lot of time to that because that's the one thing that bothers me the least.

It's not great or anything, but it is what it is. It gets you from point A to point B, I suppose. It breaks off and goes on tangents and non-sequiturs, but that's McFarlane's style. You can also expect a lot of sex and poop jokes.

Again, McFarlane's style. I can't speak for Seth, but if I were him I'd be highly disappointed in this. Not because he should be ashamed or anything, but because he knows that he can do better.

His next movie is a sequel to Ted, so here's to hoping he's learned his lessons and uses that to make his best movie yet. I will say that there's a really funny post-credits scene that definitely got a good laugh out of me.

I can't really recommend this film,, it's 30 minutes longer than it needs to be, there's too many bad jokes in here, and it wastes an incredibly talented cast. The few highlights in the film simply cannot make up for everything it simply did wrong.