A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)

Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West arrives as a Western comedy with a thesis: the frontier was miserable, filthy, and lethal, and every romantic notion we hold about it is a lie. The film catalogs dysentery, snakebite, and exploding dentistry with the diligence of a man reading from an actuarial table. This is revisionist history in the loosest sense, a comedy hook dressed as debunking. It never argues a position. It lists the ways a person could die and trusts that the list is funny. Mostly it is not, but the ambition is legible.

The cast gestures toward representation without committing to it. Wes Studi appears among the Apache, who speak their own language and are spared a gruesome death, a small mercy that reads as courtesy instead of commentary. The picture's single sustained progressive gesture is a post-credits joke in which Django Freeman shoots the proprietor of a racist carnival game, a gag that lands and then evaporates. Charlize Theron's Anna can out-shoot any man in Arizona and spends a week training the hero, which is something. She is also the prize he wins, and the script surrounds her with brothel humor that treats the world's oldest profession as an inexhaustible source of yuks.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No environmental conscience stirs in this dust. No character is granted a body that is not a punchline; the humor runs toward humiliation, not acceptance. Cowardice is the hero's affliction, played for slapstick, and no one reaches for a diagnosis. There is no queer presence of any kind. As for economics, Albert ends the film by spending his bounty on more sheep, which is a joke about capitalism or simply a joke about sheep. The film lectures no one. It has no sermon to deliver, only a long, sweaty punchline about how much the Old West stank.