A Million Ways to die in the West otherwise known as, 2 hours of Seth McFarlane shitting in your face

Mr. McFarlane, you're film was fucking awful. For twenty three minutes I sat and starred at the screen. I waited as a barrage of wildly unfunny jokes and astoundingly bad delivery from people who are supposed to be masters of the art form. For twenty three minutes I wondered if a single joke would land. For twenty three minutes I wondered how limited my life prospects were that I would keep sitting here, allowing myself to be showered in your toxic verbal diarrhea. Then, at twenty three minutes, I chuckled. I know it was twenty three minutes, because I paused the film just to check how long it took McFarlane to land one joke. It was a gay joke that finally got me. It was not overt, but it wasn't subtle. The joke felt natural, it felt like it should've been the weak joke in a good movie. And just like that it was gone, like a sliver of gold being washed away by a sea of unending shit. And that is all this movie is really, several jokes that would stand out on a bland episode of Family Guy that are drowned out in a nearly two hour flurry of bad writing, bad delivery, shoddy writing and half assed performances.

Let’s begin with the writing, it is absolutely terrible for pretty much the two hour duration. It's almost as if McFarlane had written down the premise on scrap paper as he took a shit and then handed it off to The Cleveland Show's writing team. The jokes all have this feeling of being recycled, like a comedian who has told the same joke a million times and has grown bored with it and passed it on too his protégé to recycle some more. The frontier is a dangerous place where any wacky thing can kill you, photographs weren't always instant, and the frontier had hookers, bar fights. That last sentence is how the movie feels, like the McFarlane and co., wrote down a list of stuff from the olden days and just filmed it, hoping that the joke would come in the moment or some shit. Even the cut away gags feel lazy. There’s no zing or surprise to them. They feel like a fat man squashed into an airplane seat. This kind of laziness is unacceptable from McFarlane and co. This brings us to the next point, with this hundred and how-ever many pages of unbelievable ineptitude the actors are wasted.  

The actors of the film are all incredibly talented, save one. Neeson, Harris, Ribbisi, Silverman even Gottfried have done wonderful things in the past but here they are simply left hanging, scrambling for a lifeline. Neeson as the villain is limp. Neeson can play a badass in his sleep and yet, somehow McFarlane’s shitty writing and direction makes clinch one of the worst bad guys I've ever seen. Neither funny nor menacing. Much of this seems to come from Leeson either not understanding his role or not caring at all about it. He has the usual grisly growl but his delivery seems off, like either the lines don’t work or Neeson is not sure of how clench his face and body as he delivers these lines.  

Silverman and Harris are left repeating their general shtick, but with all the joy and fun sucked out of it. Sarah Silverman for some reason is not doing her deadpan humour; instead she is made to over act and force unfunny lines at the screen. I’m pretty sure that here copy of the script was "You are a hooker, insert joke here". This is probably the biggest shame of the film. You have one of the most talented comics in the world, you could’ve given her a logline and had her write her own dialogue the night before and it would’ve probably turned out better than this. McFarlane quelled an angel while filming this and as such has saddened the world a little bit more.

Harris on the other hand is given the kitsch song and dance, maniacal mustache villain role. I've got no funnies to say about this role, it just stinks. Everyone in this movie stinks, being left with zingers like, "don't drink and horse!” Go fuck yourself and your lazy movie McFarlane. Speaking of whom, his 'acting' is the worst; he makes Tarantino look like Tom fucking Hanks.

Sure McFarlane can do some great voice work and he is a terrific performer, his Oscar's hosting was fantastic. You naysayers should just go back to your VCR and watch some eighties SNL reruns. His work in this movie though is god awful. Every line, of every joke that escapes his breath in this film will make you cringe. He is a self-aware cartoon character and that isn't funny, it's just sad. What makes it even worse is that his facial expressions almost never change. Think about it, McFarlane’s arms flailing wildly at the mere concept of a joke, while his face remains more frozen than a Keanu Reeves action figure. His vanity overcomes him in this film and chews the worn concept out until it’s a deranged mess.

Usually I like to put in a little something good about the movie, even if it's bad. Bucky Larson was made by people who had fun; Prometheus had ambition and so on. A Million Ways to die in the West has nothing good about it. It is recycled trash that should never have made it to production. What makes it all worse is that it is a film made by talented people who got lazy and are basically telling the audience to go fuck themselves for two hours while McFarlane rakes in the cash and laughs at the chumps he calls fans. This kind of dreck would be expected from the Wayans brothers, or the guys behind Meet the Spartans, but not from McFarlane. If I were McFarlane I would not have released this shit for the sheer sake of my career.

I truly hope that you're experience in making this dreck will only serve to make Ted 2 a better movie.

Lucy

Lucy is a film based on the myth of humanity only using 10% of our brain power. It is Luc Besson's first self-written and directed action flick in a long, long time as such it feels very nostalgic, like an ode to his early work. Having said that, Lucy feels like a like a missed opportunity, more of a nostalgic mess rather than heartwarming memory of Luc Besson's work from the 90s.

In the film, Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, an American student on vacation in Taipei. One hungover morning she is forced to do a mysterious delivery by her week long boyfriend. If a massive hangover and a boyfriend who looks like he sleeps in a dumpster aren't bad enough, soon enough Lucy finds herself face to face with a psychotic Korean mob boss. One thing leads to another and she wakes up in a bed having been turned into a carrying case for some kind of future-science drug. Yada-yada-yada, drug bag bursts in her stomach and she goes all batshit crazy looking for a mixture of revenge and more of the drug. Had this been the entire driving force of the movie, it would have been fantastic. Scarlett Jo, kicking ass, Chok-Min Sook going all psycho on everyone, Morgan Freeman narrating the whole thing. Seriously think about all of that for a moment, it is a dream come true. It is too bad then, that at the halfway mark the film turns into dull techno babble and pseudo-science with the  action relegated to background as if they were some old drapes.

The action scenes are probably the most disappointing part of the film. Besson has choreographed some grand mayhem in the past and has even fostered most this generation’s action franchises in one way or the other. Kiss of The Dragon, Fifth Element, Leon and the rest of his old work all had this insanely beautiful violence that was paced perfectly and was wrought with tension.  Sadly in Lucy, they feel like they were an afterthought. Almost as if the script was written with lengthy passages of sciency sounding bullshit, with place holders labeled, action scene here, scattered along every few pages. I can see Besson sitting at his work desk wondering if he could turn A Beautiful Mind into an action film. But not a loud and furious, all engrossing gunplay type of action film, something  more along the lines of timid and restrained Victorian gunplay.

Chok-Min Sook plays the dastardly villain Jang. You know he's psychotic because he is introduced right after he brutalizes two random people in the washroom. A one dimensional villain in this type of movie is fine. It rallies the audience behind the hero and if the role and actor mix well, a one dimensional villain transcends cliché and becomes a magnetic force. In this way, Jang is very reminiscent of Gary Oldman's Zorg and Stansfield, from the Besson classics; The Fifth Element and Leon, respectively. Sadly, where the Oldman was given room to breathe, flesh out his characters madness' and eat more scenery than Meryl Streep when she feels like winning an Oscar, Sook is left only crumbs too feast on. His scenes diminish as the movie unfolds, going from full on moments where he sucks in all the attention from every viewer like some angry black hole looking for more food, to sitting in a car brooding like some generic everyman villain Hollywood loves these days. If the villain was generic it would have been fine, but the problem is that he is not. There is obviously plenty of fun to have with him and we get glimpses of it throughout the movie. Sadly those glimpses are just that, glimpses into something that could've been, instead of the yawn worthy movie bad guy number 6 we get.  Who knows, maybe when the inevitable super special 100% edition is released we will get to see more of Jang and his absurd lunacy. At the end of the day though, Besson can and has done better which makes Jang’s waste an even bigger shame.

Then we have Morgan Freeman, this is his second strike of the year after the shitfest that was Transcendence. Yet again Freeman is relegated too spewing pseudo-science while wearing some proffesory garb. Yes we know, Morgan Freeman sounds wise and insightful and wearing those jackets make him look like the most dapper old man this side of the 1950s. Problem is, even Morgan Freeman can't turn shit into gold. Besson, Pfister and Freeman have tried that twice and failed miserably both times. It's almost as if Freeman doesn't want to narrate my dreams anymore, so he just chooses the scripts with the dumbest science shit in the hopes that I won't be soothed by his voice anymore. Nice try Freeman, but I don't give up that easily.

Lastly and most importantly we have the titular Lucy, who starts off as a badass, shooting anyone in her way, cabbies, cancer victims, mobsters etc. Yet as the story progresses and she becomes more powerful she somehow becomes less and less badass. This though is not the most troubling part. The troubling part is that as she becomes the most powerful human to ever exist, literally, she requires men to take care of her more and more. Her first act as a superhuman is to clear a room of villains and shrug off a bullet wound. That's the movie I wanted to see. By the end of the film she requires regular men to hold off Jang and his army for her. Narratively this makes no sense either, because two scenes earlier, she effortlessly disabled six of his men with a wave of her wrist. On top of that she drags around the male cop just to have someone hold her hand and 'remind' her of what she used to be. Leon and Fifth Element both had limp romance angles but they worked. They worked because the film established them properly in their own world. In Leon, it was awkward and felt quite off, but it matched the tone of the film. In The Fifth Element it was cheesy and light, just like the movie. In Lucy, the romance is just shoved into the film, like amateurs filming a fisting session. Why would a god need some bumbling French cop to hold off some two bit mobsters, when she could just as easily make all those mobsters float off into the sky?

This all being said, the movie is not without its merits. The score is terrific; it’s vibrant and heart pumping. It is also part of the feeling of nostalgia that washes over fans of Besson's early work. This is all due to Eric Serra being the composer, the genius behind The Fifth Element. The score does exactly what any score should, heighten each scene it's attached too. Serra's work takes even the limpest of scenes and brings drama too it, like a really good athlete trying to carry his team.

On top of this, the cinematography and art direction is also top notch. The cinematography evokes a great deal of Leon.  It feels kind of like going back to your childhood home, if that childhood home was the setting of a love story between a brain damaged hitman and an eleven year old girl. This feeling of nostalgia also lets you disregard certain weaknesses in the action scenes, namely that they get weaker as the film progresses.

Finally the colour scheme works really well. It's crisp and clean and matches the tone of each progressive scene quite well. The use of colours is not original or even all that creative really, borrowing aspects from all over the place. Instead the scheme feels finely tuned, as the work of a master should.

Overall the film is a clashing mess of two separate films. The first half is exactly what the trailers sell you on. Scarlett Jo, getting drugged up and going Kung-Fu with a side of gunplay on everyone. The second half of the film is a pseudo-sciency mess of outdated science myths with shitty philosophical pondering. Besson enthusiasts will find some joy in the nostalgia, but will be left remembering a master's glory and ruminating on his fall. Everyone else will sit down watch the movie and give a resounding shrug of indifference.