McFarlane: A Million Ways To Die In The West (2014)

A Million Ways To Die In The West may not be Seth McFarlane’s first film, but it is his first film as lead actor, which makes it feel like more of a transition from Family Guy and American Dad. In essence, it’s a parody Western, in which McFarlane plays a luckless sheep farmer who discovers his inner courage when a mysterious stranger, played by Charlize Theron, rides into town. However, parody is perhaps not quite the right word, since it’s clear that McFarlane wants to recreate the classic Technicolor Western as much as send it up – it’s full of lavish cinematography and breathtaking establishing shots, fulfilling the widescreen ambitions that Family Guy sometimes harbors at its most indulgent. For the most part, that doesn’t quite gel into fond parody so much as interpolate McFarlane’s incredulous manner and personality into a straight genre piece, to the point that he’s almost a voiceover, as redolent of his cult commentaries on the Family Guy DVDs as of the series itself. And although that produces long lags that aren’t really played for laughs, it means that the laughs are particularly sharp, when they finally do come - Family Guy’s taste for a certain kind of blithe historical anachronism is perfected here, partly because McFarlane plays as a rotation of the best Family Guy characters, moving almost subliminally between Peter and Brian in particular. Not only that, it’s clear from his first words that he simply is that unique Family Guy enunciation, that peculiar way of over-articulating everything, even incredulity, until it’s parched of anything but the most bureaucratic, domestic banality. For that reason, most of his best moments aren’t jokes or one-liners but endless, paratactic inanities that take more and more away from language each time, anticlimaxing with comic abandon. To sustain a feature-length film, rather than a twenty-minute episode peppered with cutaways, that register requires a pretty sympathetic foil, but Theron works perfectly – she and McFarlane might not have much romantic chemistry, but they have great buddy-chemistry; she’s a perfect bridge between his cartoony appearance and the real world, and the film often works best when they feel like an animated-real world odd couple, or composite, parrying Family Guy-style repartee against the bluffs and peaks of Monument Valley.