Cholera, wolves, gunslingers, runaway bulls, exploding flash bulbs there’s always something to kill you on the Wild West frontier. As he points out repeatedly-MacFarlane never wrote a joke he only wanted to tell once-Stark’s world is a deadly one. In the first of several bad decisions, the charmless MacFarlane (a talented writer in the prime of "Family Guy" but completely unengaging as a leading man) plays Albert Stark, a sheep herder living in the dangerous time of 1882 Arizona.
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Which leads one to ask, how did they make it through the editing/post-production process? As we so often ask ourselves with awful comedies, did they really think this was funny? There are scenes/jokes that hit the dusty ground of Monument Valley with such a remarkable thud that no one in the preview audience with whom I saw the film laughed.
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A failure on nearly every level, "A Million Ways to Die in the West" almost approaches so-bad-you-need-to-see-it categorization. The mistakes made in the production of "A Million Ways to Die in the West," reminiscent of the worst comedic tendencies of the Happy Madison crew, feel like a byproduct of a man-child allowed to do whatever he wants because it worked last time. With no one there to edit his extreme tendencies, to tell him casting himself in the lead might be a mistake, to warn him that breezy comedies shouldn’t be nearly two hours long, Seth MacFarlane’s carte blanche that came with the box office success of " Ted" proves to be his undoing.
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Unexpected success often leads to creative disaster.