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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Photo: Lorey Sebastian/ \u00A9Universal Studios\n\nLooking as saucy as Hollandaise and as amused as a Hollywood Ph. D. teaching remedial acting to a fourth-grader\u2014you get one guess who that might be, gang\u2014Charlize Theron is as loose and goofily funny in A Million Ways To Die in The West as she's ever been in a movie. Will you ever be grateful to her, too, because she's just about the only thing worth watching in Seth MacFarlane's Western spoof. Otherwise, except for bits and pieces, the thing had me clawing my way to the exits as if I'd spent two hours trapped inside a used condom the size of the Hindenburg.\n\nProving wonders never cease, Theron even gets MacFarlane to react to a fellow human being with something other than smug derision in her scenes with the movie's co-writer/director/producer/star. If he seems a little rattled about that, he's right to be. He's playing Albert Stark, a nebbishy sheep farmer in the Arizona territory in 1882 whose allergy to showdowns provokes his fed-up girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) into moving on with Neil Patrick Harris as Foy, the finicky owner of the local mustache-care emporium. Then Theron turns up as a ballsy gal named Anna who takes a shine to our hero and coaches him in gunplay and other useful life lessons. What Albert doesn't know is that she's really the unhappy wife of Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson), the baddest bandit ever to wield a six-shooter.\n\nConsidering that the coward who's got to test himself for true love's sake is the trustiest concept in the whole comedy-Western genre, none of this is what you'd call unpromising. MacFarlane won't ever be accused of not knowing his retro deities backwards and forwards, and his specific antecedent here is Bob Hope\u2014the pre-dinosaur Hope of The Paleface and Son of Paleface, when he had the gutless-wonder bit down pat. Among other differences, however, those amiable movies weren't filmed in the ne plus ultra  of Western locations, Monument Valley\u2014what would have been the point?\u2014and they didn't feature all-star supporting casts in dim-bulb one-joke roles.\n\nThe real peculiarity of A Million Ways To Die in The West\u2014and what a waste of a great title\u2014is that it's got no good reason to be a Western in the first place, tongue-in-cheek or not. As scattershot as the jokes were in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, which was plenty, the movie did satirize all sorts of Western chestnuts that audiences in 1974 could still recall. MacFarlane, on the other hand, has tricked out a middling-to-good conventional rom-com\u2014one that might play just fine in modern dress, especially since he, Theron, and the other performers don't exactly work overtime to convince us they're anything but our glib, bantering contemporaries\u2014with a gigantic burlesque apparatus that 2014's moviegoers don't relate to and that he can't figure out a use for. The handful of jokes that relate to the setting are as unintegrated and random as can be, like Giovanni Ribisi (who plays Albert's best pal) saying \"Don't drink and horse\" as a sloshed MacFarlane lurches into the saddle.\n\nSince we don't say \"Don't drink and car,\" that line tells you everything about the script's shoddiness. Did MacFarlane and his co-writers really think \"Don't drink and ride\" would be too subtle? You keep growing more mystified by what he thought he was up to in larding the movie with period flummery he's surprisingly inept at. Though the musical score is an entertaining parody of classic horse operas' bucolic bombast, composer Joel McNeely's work is pretty much wasted; nothing in the action plays off it. Meanwhile, Michael Barrett's vista-happy cinematography is a positive nuisance\u2014not only the wrong scale for a comedy, but irrelevant in other ways, because Barrett's, ahem, style doesn't echo or send up the visual conventions of Westerns in any recognizably apt way.\n\nRibisi and his on-screen sidekick, Sarah Silverman\u2014as a hooker who's saving herself for marriage while taking on 15 clients a day\u2014do have a couple of moments that aren't too bad. At least before you realize they're both stuck working variations on the same routine until death grows attractive, Silverman playing someone who's a) a ninny and b) a naif\u2014two things she's definitely not\u2014actually makes her kind of sexy in a whuzzat-again way. On the other hand, my fond belief that Neil Patrick Harris can find the funny in the most inadequate script has been undone at Seth MacFarlane's hands. All you really need to know is that a scene of NPH borrowing strangers' hats to crap in during an attack of public diarrhea is the highlight of his performance.\n\nGranted, Liam Neeson is fun to watch. But that's purely because he's Liam Neeson playing a Western bad guy; Clinch Leatherwood's name aside, the role isn't even especially parodic. Instead, Neeson basically does the same crap that bad guys in \"straight\" Westerns always do, minus any noticeable meta zingers or, how you say, horseplay. You may wince when he cuffs Theron across the face, too\u2014nothing in this flimsy movie justifies the moment's brutality.\n\nThe only way I can see to account for A Million Ways To Die in The West is that\u2014like MacFarlane's Rat Pack homages\u2014it's just his way of indulging a fantasy and putting it in air quotes to live up to his smartass rep. Ben Stiller is Hollywood's reigning expert at this gambit; you know, he's just making fun of narcissists, satirizing overblown Rambo heroics, and so on. And Stiller is better at it. Literally the only effective scene in A Million Ways depicts Albert's dream life once a kindly Indian chief (Wes Studi) gets him high on home-brewed hallucinogens, and it's completely out of synch with the rest of the movie.\n\nSure, you can tell that everybody on the set had a blast. But since the audience got left out, that's not much of a recommendation. Personally, I'm fed up with comedy stars prattling in Q&amp;amp;As about how much \"fun\" a movie was to make, because why should we give a fuck? Better they should be miserable and deliver something decent instead\u2014and while they're at it, they oughta make sure to work in a part for Charlize Theron. Unlike MacFarlane, that's one dame who really knows what she's doing.\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/seth-macfarlane-million-ways-to-die-in-the-west>