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Seth MacFarlane
May 15, 2014
Albert (Seth MacFarlane) is a polite sheep farmer who despises the frontier. “It’s a disgusting dirty place” , he says, “a cesspool of despair.” When his fiancée Louise (Amanda Seyfried) breaks up with him and starts seeing a wealthy owner of a moustache grooming salon, the “despair” of his everyday life is made worse. Fortunately he rediscovers love with a fascinating stranger named Anna (Charlize Theron), who gives him the courage to face the perils of life. When Clinch (Liam Neeson) (Anna’s husband) rides into town, his newly found bravery is put to the test.
Along the way, MacFarlane sprinkles in as much potty, racial, and meta-based humor as he can, most of it intended for shock effect, mass ridiculousness, and offensiveness. There is an unending obsession with farting throughout the movie. Both a prolonged sequence in which Foy defecates into a line of hats and a picture of a sheep penis peeing into Albert’s face made me gag. At one point Albert asks why a shooting gallery game involves gunning escaped African slaves, but then he says something shameful about Arabs. Every joke has been written in the signature style of Seth MacFarlane, who exaggerates the punchline and uses it repeatedly until it loses its humor. It’s very possible that this came from MacFarlane’s time directing the edgy network show “Family Guy” where running jokes can last a whole season, but creating an actual “film” is a lot more than stacking overused jokes on top of each other.
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