Review: A Million Ways to Die in the West

City Paper grade: C

Taking a disorganized scratchpad of frontier standup bits and stretching it into a two-hour A-List feature, Seth MacFarlane manages to squeeze some significant laughs out of a simple premise: The Wild West, or at least our movie-exaggerated understanding of it, is unsafe for human consumption. But once all the gory joke kills and fart-and-poop material is exhausted, it's clear what the Family Guy creator is actually offering: a self-serving vehicle so desperate to be edgy that it takes broad liberties with privileged material. MacFarlane, as wishy-washy sheep farmer Albert Stark, loses the girl of his dreams (Amanda Seyfried) after wussing out at a high-noon gunfight. He gets a chance to redeem himself once mysterious Anna (Charlize Theron), quick with the pistols and preternaturally interested in Albert, arrives in town, hoping to wriggle free of her domineering outlaw husband (Liam Neeson). Though it's near-impossible to buy one of the most beautiful women in the world falling for MacFarlane, whose face looks like a canned ham covered in pancake makeup, there is an ease to their interactions that shows off a slight bit of sweetness. But all that's overpowered by the script's wagon train of reaction-baiting racist and sexist cracks, not so much offensive as they are lazily conceived. The movie's best sequence, by far, involves Albert tripping balls on peyote, which goes to show how undesirable MacFarlane's earthly setting really is.