As a cowardly farmer begins to fall for the mysterious new woman in town, he must put his new-found courage to the test when her husband, a notorious gun-slinger, announces his arrival.

Now, perhaps I shouldn’t really be reviewing this film. After all, for the first time in my cinema going life, I left a film early due to the absolute rubbish I was sitting through. I’ve managed to sit through many bad films over the years, some with the hope that they’ll get better, and some with the misguided notion that somehow staying to the end is noble and the right thing to do. That’s all come to an end with this excruciatingly awful film from Seth MacFarlane, that managed to provide a grand total of 0 laughs in the first hour, and a complete lack of understanding at how to parody a genre. Now it might have got better, but I wasn’t hanging around to find out – there were certainly no signs of it in the first hour.

It’s fairly disappointing as I was a huge fan of Ted, which seemed to get the balance right between crude comedy and a good story, and also boasted strong performances from Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis. Perhaps one of the many ways this film falls down is in the increased presence of MacFarlane himself (not hid behind the Ted persona as in that film). Whatever people’s opinions on him as a writer are, the man is not an actor and there was nothing interesting enough in the script to help overcome how annoying he was. Speaking of annoying, Sarah Silverman was terrible, merely turning up for crude jokes about sex, and Giovanni Ribisi is fast becoming one of my least favourite actors based on his involvement with MacFarlane projects, which is a shame because he can play sleazy and creepy characters really well at times.

Even ignoring that, the film just misses the target at everything. It’s parody and satire of the Old West is as biting as it was a ‘dangerous time and lots of people died’, and it makes you wonder what the purpose of setting the film back then was? The film’s idea of funny is a series of fart and poop jokes, which don’t serve any story purpose and are just thrown in almost to make up for the laziness on MacFarlane’s part to actually craft a joke. This is possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen, and whilst it may have got better, I’d be comfortable enough to sit on my pedestal and say that anyone that enjoys this is a complete and utter moron.

Rating: 0/5

Directed By: Seth MacFarlane

Starring: Seth MacFarlane, Charlize Theron, Amanda Seyfried, Giovanni Ribisi, Sarah Silverman, Neil Patrick Harris and Liam Neeson

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2557490/