Easy Dying; Hard Comedy: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

Seth MacFarlane must think you’re stupid. For A Million Ways to Die in the West, his second feature film, the creator of the nauseating cartoon Family Guy and the so-so R-rated teddy-bear comedy Ted has written and directed a Western comedy that assumes you have only a passing familiarity at best with the genre and with the history of the American frontier. The screenplay, a loose collection of often ugly comedy conceits strung along a fairly standard Western plot, is written from a detached angle to the material, filled with characters who stand back and explain the context of the jokes. This is how a town in Arizona got ice shipped from Boston. Here’s the level of medical care a frontier town could expect. Did you know people don’t smile in old pictures? Did you know there were a lot of deadly dangers in the Wild West? There’s a condescension here that assumes you won’t get the jokes, such as they are. It’s a movie made for people who snicker at old movies for no other reason than because they’re from another time.

Stuck in approach somewhere between Lawrence Kasdan’s grinning revival Silverado and Mel Brooks’ anything-goes satire Blazing Saddles, MacFarlane’s film is at once a smirking know-it-all comedy and a somewhat earnest attempt to do a Western. The plot is simple. It’s 1882 in Old Stump, Arizona. A poor sheep farmer (MacFarlane, giving himself the lead) is left by his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) and soon starts courting the beautiful stranger (Charlize Theron) who happens to ride into town. Unbeknownst to him, she’s the wife of the region’s most terrifying gunfighter (Liam Neeson). That’s the skeleton of a fine Western plot, and it’s carried along by expansive widescreen photography from Michael Barrett and a classically trumpeting score by Joel McNeely sounding a lot like what Max Steiner or Dimitri Tiomkin would’ve done in the genre’s heyday. But every time a character speaks, it’s with a clattering, colloquial modern speaking tone that’s ironic, smarmy, and simply not funny.

Patient zero for this flat, desperately unfunny performative patter is MacFarlane, who delivers his own writing with the enervating energy of an overeager standup. He’s impressed with himself, convinced his subpar quips and lazy observations are hilarious. He’s not charming. He’s smug. His character is disconnected, standing aside from even his castmates. He’s given long scenes in which he stands apart, mugging for the camera as he makes fun of 1800’s fashion, medicine, politics, transportation, and technology from a vaguely know-something modern perspective, nothing a high school freshman who half paid attention to history class couldn’t snark. It’s impossible to take him seriously as a person in this story, which is too bad considering the nearly two-hour movie has him in every scene. I simply couldn’t get invested in a whiny, inconsistent character who is barely invested in the plot himself. He keeps giving the whole production the side-eye, as if he knows more than he does and feels so very self-satisfied about it.

Meanwhile, there are real actors around him who at times make his (and Family Guy co-conspirators Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild’s) repetitive and insulting writing seem almost palatable. Theron’s a welcome presence, transforming a decorative plot device into something like a character. Neeson for the most part retains his dignity, assuming that’s a stunt butt that gets a daisy stuck in it, as he seemingly gallops in from a serious Western. Elsewhere, Sarah Silverman and Giovanni Ribisi are trapped in a gross-out subplot that plays like bad knockoff Farrelly brothers, with a prostitute and her fiancé “waiting for marriage,” but they almost make it work. The only person who gets the peculiar tone of the picture exactly right is Neil Patrick Harris, playing a mustachioed jerk wringing every bit of possible enjoyment out of his every appearance. He has to play a scene where he suffers a fit of diarrhea in the middle of the street, catching his runny excrement in his floppy cowboy hat. And he almost makes it work.

MacFarlane is a stunted, juvenile gag writer who expects to get laughs out of edgy material, but fails to shape jokes with thought or artistry. It’s a flat, stiff production that can barely set up a decent sight gag. Characters are placed in front of the camera, barely move, and talk at each other in bad sitcom asides. Periodically they blurt out references to horrible subject matter – racism, misogyny, domestic violence, murder, rape, child abuse – and MacFarlane assumes the shock will get a laugh. The movie is casually dismissive and/or actively hateful to women, Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, Jews, and Muslims. Sometimes the racism is cut with the smug white guy in the center of it all pulling ain’t-I-a-stinker? faces. A “Runaway Slave” carnival shooting game has targets that are big-lipped, wide-eyed blackface images chowing down on a slice of watermelon. Two Chinese men wear rice-paddy hats and sport Fu Manchus. A character jokes he’s going to recite his “Islamic death chant” and proceeds to ululate gibberish.

You can’t have your aggressive stereotyping and hate speech and wave it off, too. So what if (only sometimes) MacFarlane turns to another character and says, “Um, isn’t that racist?” It is. But then what, exactly, are we supposed to be laughing at? The movie comes across as stubbornly created from the perspective of a narrow-minded, privileged, rich white male tittering at anything beyond his immediate frame of reference. Words have meaning. Images have power. MacFarlane knows what buttons to push, but fails to truly grapple with, subvert, or defuse their impact. As director, he can barely stage a High Noon shootout, saloon brawl, surreal drug trip, or musical number with any clarity or consistency. No wonder he can’t even begin to figure out how to frame or otherwise handle hot-button issues.

He wants laughs, and I truly believe you can craft a good joke out of any topic, but he goes about it in exactly the wrong way. This is comedy filmmaking at its most cheap, lazy, and unthinking. Are we supposed to laugh because he went there, or does he actually think he’s being clever? The writing is either offensive or groan-worthy. The gross-out anatomical gags are just gross. Cameos (Christopher Lloyd? Ewan McGregor? Ryan Reynolds?) are merely random nothings. The violence is flatly presented and full of miscalculated gore. A face bloodily squished by a brick of ice isn’t exactly a fun pratfall. At best, the movie is either unfunny or incompetent, a pleasant and vacant experience. But when it’s bad, it’s odious.

Badfellas: GANGSTER SQUAD

Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad is a movie that’s, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Sarris, less than meets the eye. This period piece gangster picture is great looking, slickly costumed and impeccably production designed. The sharp cinematography is shiny and Fleischer has a nice eye for visual compositions that’s put to good, crisp use. The color timing gives it all a vivid Fiestaware palate that’s just south of Technicolor. It’s a recreation of 1949 Los Angeles that’s less realism and more a sense of movie realism with dapper movie stars running around town speaking with a rat-a-tat cadence similar to the gunfire they set off from time to time. Unfortunately, this handsomely mounted cinematic world is wasted on a thin script by Will Beall, a document made up of leathery clichés and characterization that leans back on star presence rather than creating anything worth caring about.

The plot’s a loose elaboration on a true story that follows a squad of police officers tasked with a secret vigilante mission to dismantle gangster Mickey Cohen’s criminal operation and free L.A. of organized crime. The grizzled police chief (Nick Nolte) puts Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) in charge of this mission. The team comes together in quick montage fashion. It’s your typical collection of loose cannons, the charming youngster (Ryan Gosling), the aging gunslinger (Robert Patrick), the technical expert (Giovanni Ribisi), and the rest (Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña). I’d complain about how the script so undervalues those last two I couldn’t even explain them with a trope, but I can barely explain any these characters even with the simplest of terms. They’re all only here to look good in a suit and get into brutal shootouts with gangsters

Big bad Cohen, played by an exaggerated Sean Penn under a layer of makeup like he’s playing a Dick Tracy villain, grumbles and growls his way through the film, intimidating all he comes into contact with. We know he means bloody business when the opening scene features him drawing and quartering a Chicago rival between two automobiles, a gross moment that plays out fully in frame behind the Hollywoodland sign. This is a violent movie that quickly sets up its bad guy as very bad, as if that excuses the all out war that the gangster squad takes to him in endless sequences of destruction and death that play out in stylish, flashily filmed takes that sometimes slow into glamorizing slow motion. The squad is made up of guys that stand shoulder to shoulder in billowing trench coats and nice hats; they’re iconographically pleasing, but dramatically predictable.

Token romance brings the most dispiriting aspect of the movie’s wasteful approach to its ensemble, counting on charm alone to paper over lazy plotting and dull, routine character beats. And if anyone could do just that, you’d think it could be Emma Stone, so sparkling in every single movie in which she’s appeared. Not so here, playing Cohen’s girl who has a Gosling on the side. Although she fills her beautiful gowns with a sense of old school glamour, she can’t bring enough sparkle to spark life in predictable scenes in which she’s romantic, concerned, or in danger. Similarly misused is Mireille Enos as Brolin’s wife. She has the understandable yet all too typical scenes where the wife worries about her husband and tells him that his work’s important, but not as important as her. It’s the kind of role we’ve seen a thousand times over and here is nothing more than a blatant attempt to add rooting interest to a flat character.

All dressed up with nowhere to go, this broadly played gangster picture ends up well short of greatness, but since it’s not swinging for the fences it doesn’t quite backfire into terrible either. If anything, it’s a slight modulation away from parody, especially in a finale that ends in a laughably overwrought shootout followed by a credulity straining one-on-one fistfight. For something so stylishly handled, it’s so easily ignored as it plays, a big empty clattering homage to films far better, from similar genre revivals like De Palma’s The Untouchables all the way back to classic Warner Brothers crime pictures of the film’s time period and slightly before. (They could very well be playing a block away from any of the settings on screen here.) Fleischer is a director of great visual zing who burst onto the scene in 2009 with Zombieland, a funny genre riff that I found entertaining at the time, although I haven’t revisited it in the years since. With Gangster Squad, he has almost all the right pieces in place, but it’s a film that frustratingly resists becoming as good as it looks.

Bad Toy Story: TED

The Ted in Ted is a teddy bear. His owner Johnny, a friendless eight-year-old boy, makes a Christmas wish upon a shooting star and, just like that, the bear comes alive. He’s a walking, talking, little fuzzball who becomes fast friends with little Johnny. Being a sentient teddy bear is sufficiently unusual that Ted becomes a news sensation and then a minor celebrity. All the while, his best friend Johnny is by his side. A G-rated version of this story would stop there, but this movie goes all the way to R. Now, over two decades later, Ted’s fame has fizzled out and he and Johnny (Mark Wahlberg) hold down minimum wage jobs, smoke weed, and watch cheesy movies (especially the 80’s Flash Gordon) all day every day. Johnny’s girlfriend of four years (Mila Kunis) thinks that it’s time the bear moves out, but Johnny’s not so sure he could live without him. And with that, we’ve arrived at what is hopefully the apex of man-child comedy. The living teddy bear is perhaps the ultimate self-reflexive metaphor for a character who really needs to get his act together and grow up already.

The movie is written and directed by Seth MacFarlane, the creator of a handful of grating animated sitcoms, the most successful of which is Family Guy, a show that builds its humor out of non sequiturs, bad taste, and repetitiveness. (Two writers for that show, Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, are credited with an assist on the movie’s screenplay). With Ted, MacFarlane has a great concept, lots of jokes, but not much of a movie. I suppose it would help if you found the humor funny. There are exactly three categories the jokes can be sorted into: 1. The teddy bear does or says something, usually crude, that is incongruous with his innocent exterior; 2. The teddy bear does something one wouldn’t expect a teddy bear to do, like wear a suit, drive a car, or do drugs; 3. The teddy bear, or one of his human costars, makes a pop culture reference or reacts to a cameo. The first two kinds of jokes are funny for a while, but soon lose their novelty. The third kind is mildly amusing the first few times, especially the cameos, and then starts to seem like a crutch.

But the main problem with Ted isn’t that it’s bad, exactly. It’s not just that the jokes are arranged in a pattern that’s easy to figure out – something happens or something is said; bear swears, says pop culture reference, or probably both – and are easily categorized. It’s not even that I happened to find the jokes unfunny. The main problem is that the movie is so hopelessly under-plotted and lazily made. The central conflict of the movie, that the man-child needs to grow up, is something that has been done before and better in countless other comedies, and is set up almost immediately here. The way it develops is painfully familiar, without dramatic interest of any kind as it hits each and every story beat you’d expect with little cleverness or invention. From then on out all the movie has to offer is aimless flailing about until it arrives, seemingly by accident, at a climax that resolves the A-plot by roping in a subplot (involving poor Giovanni Ribisi as Ted’s stalker fan) that was awkwardly introduced and promptly forgotten so that its sudden return is actually a bit of a surprise. And then, to top it all off, MacFarlane throws in awkward sentiment of the kind he starts the film rejecting, as if he could think of no more creative way to finish things off.

At first, I though I might end up complimenting MacFarlane on his actual filmmaking in his live-action debut. I thought he might turn out to be a competent comedy director if he could write (or find) a better screenplay. But that was before he – and, to be fair, his editor – makes a total jumbled mess out of a simple conversation between three people in one cubicle. Each character is held in separate medium shots, which are assembled in such a confusing manner, cutting on each line of dialogue, that I lost all geographical bearings in what is an awfully small space. (Why not use one shot instead of three? Who knows?)  Still, MacFarlane has smartly cast the film, not just Kunis and Wahlberg, who are admirably playing the material like they don’t know it’s supposed to be funny, but small parts for Joel McHale, Patrick Warburton, and other amusing people. Also Patrick Stewart narrates for some reason.

The funniest thing about the movie is that Ted himself is a creative idea convincingly brought to life. MacFarlane voices him in a funny, likable way so that even his most outrageous comments and behavior seem palatable. The animation of the bear is cute, too. There’s no denying that the comedic and creative high-point of the film is a smashing brawl between Wahlberg and this teddy bear as they punch and kick at each other, leaving a trail of destruction all around a small hotel room. That’s a pretty good scene. But Ted is certainly not in a good movie. There’s not enough creativity to match the central conceit. Instead, MacFarlane seems to think throwing enough stereotypes (crudely sketched moments with at least one to offend each race, creed, gender, and orientation in the audience) at the screen, or giving the cute bear enough incongruous R-rated material to perform, will compensate for not having much of a story to tell or any good idea of how to film it. It seems desperate for laughs, or worse, convinced that it’s lazy approach will get them anyways.

Import/Export: CONTRABAND

The small surprise of Contraband, a one-last-job heist movie (yes, one of those), is that it’s marginally clever, reasonably engaging, and filled with enjoyable little bits of character acting. It’s not great, and it’s hardly what you could call believable, but it has a somewhat authentic griminess, a couple neat twists, a few halfway decent thriller setpieces, and it held my attention. It’s a modest studio thriller with slimy bad guys and likable antiheroes going through a familiar plot. I doubt I’ll remember much about it next January. I feel it slipping away from me even now. But then again, you never know.

It stars Mark Wahlberg as a talented smuggler who now runs his own security company. He’s given up the game to focus on keeping his wife (Kate Beckinsale) and their two sons safe. Unfortunately, his wife’s brother (Caleb Landry Jones) has run afoul of a mean low-level crime boss (Giovanni Ribisi) who demands repayment for a missed shipment of drugs, threatening to come after their whole family if he doesn’t get the money in a timely manner.

With the help of another rehabilitated criminal (Ben Foster), Wahlberg is able to gain employment on a freighter to Panama with a crew that includes his brother-in-law, his actual brother (Lukas Haas), and a few other guys who will try to help him sneak a lot of counterfeit money past the suspicious captain (J.K. Simmons) and back into the port of New Orleans. It’s supposed to be a simple job, after which Wahlberg can pay back the baddies and comfortably leave criminality behind him. You might be able to guess that it won’t be that easy.

Baltasar Kormákur, an Icelandic actor and director who starred in, but didn’t direct, the original Icelandic film upon which Contraband is based, directs the film. He and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (who also shot The Hurt Locker, so the one really cool super-slo-mo explosion is less rip-off and more repeat) give it a blockheaded shakiness, animating it with a kind of slick pulp dread. I particularly liked the way they handled the portions of the film that take place on the freighter itself, finding some thrill in the process of clomping up and down the halls, trying to smuggle the goods past the crew members who aren’t in on the secret plan.

During a brief time off the boat in Panama, the imagery opens up with dusty sunshine. There, Wahlberg and company get caught in the crossfire of an overlapping heist when local robbers in duct-tape masks (led by a sort of funny Diego Luna) fire back at a heavily armed police force. It’s a brief scene of urban warfare that unexpectedly put me in mind of Michael Mann’s Heat. Of course, this is no Heat, but it has a similar overarching concern with the viability of criminal lifestyles (though it’s not interested in the substance of that idea) and also a big cops and robbers shootout in the middle.

Even at its sleaziest, when Kormákur stages scenes of children in danger and a last-minute damsel in distress with a slimily brutal effectiveness and overkill, this is a film that makes room for its character actors to make choices. (But not poor Beckinsale, in a dull worried wife role; she gets next to nothing to do and still gets punished by the plot for it). Are the supporting players’ choices always for the better? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but at least character actors are doing what they do best, injecting personality into the proceedings. That’s what helps to bring the movie up to a level of adequacy it would otherwise have struggled to achieve, even with the fairly propulsive filmmaking.

It all helps to distract ever so slightly from how slight it all is. Ribisi gives a squirrely, nasally quality to his role that makes him as pathetic as intimidating. Simmons has a choppy but bumbling voice here that doesn’t dull his ease with sarcasm. I guess what I’m saying is that between interesting voices in the supporting roles, fun little details like duct-tape masks and neat little thriller moments that involve fairly believable, if improbably successful, smuggling switcheroos, there’s enough to Contraband to count it as a reasonably diverting midwinter midlevel studio programmer.