Seth MacFarlane is a talented satirist who loves to riff on traditional entertainment elements.  That’s fine, but he does so with the perspective of a young teenage boy who thinks profanity and scatological humor represent the highest order of humor. Thus, his movie A Million Ways to Die in the West — for which he stars, directs, produces and co-writes — is a lot like Blazing Saddles, only lewder, cruder and ruder, and is not nearly as clever.

MacFarlane also, in the attempt to make a good movie, makes a tactical mistake.  He spends twenty to thirty minutes trying to convince the audience that his character and that of lovely Charlize Theron develop a real romance, one that transcends all the silliness of the script.  I’m all for character development, but in this case MacFarlane stops trying to be funny in order to pull heartstrings.  It’s disingenuous to the movie.

The movie’s premise — that the West was a cruel, unforgiving place to human beings — is well taken.  The death humor is rude but often shockingly funny.  If MacFarlane had stuck to skewering the townspeople, literally, the movie might have been able to sustain a subversive comic tone.  He treats the romance stuff very seriously, but then his own character is so anachronistic that it undermines the entire concept.  And there were loads of opportunities for sheep jokes which were studiously ignored.

Despite terrific cinematography and a nice score by Joel McNeely, the film is only fitfully funny and occasionally cringe-worthy.  The supporting cast keeps things moving, including a kooky mustache song led by Neil Patrick Harris, but it isn’t enough for this to qualify as a real film.  It’s more like a series of sketches deriding the West strung together by a guy who doesn’t belong there.  ☆ 1/2.  11 June 2014.