A Million Ways to Die in the West

In 2006, M. Night Shyamalan cast himself in a supporting role in his hugely divisive fairy tale ‘The Lady in the Water’. His character was a messaniac figure destined to bring about world peace or a successful two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, I forget which. Anyway, Shyamalan’s character was the impossibly saintly MacGuffin upon which the entire drama of the film turned. And it earned him an unholy amount of brickbats, a goodly number of critics reckoning him misguided at best and an arrogant tosspot at worst.

In 2014, Seth MacFarlane cast himself in the lead role in his hugely juvenile western ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ so that he could bring about world peace or a successful two-state solution between Israel and Palestine snog Charlize Theron.

MacFarlane plays Albert Stark, a self-deprecating sheep-farmer who lives with his parents, hates the wild west for its general ugliness and tendency to curtail lifespans, and finds his only solace in the arms of Louise (Amanda Seyfried). Well, he did for a while. The film opens with his wheedling his way out of a gunfight and earning Louise’s contempt for not acting like a man. Albert responds to rejection in the time-honoured male tradition of going out and getting drunk with his best bud. Said best bud is Edward (Giovanni Ribisi), a virginal shoe-seller whose hooker girlfriend Ruth (Sarah Silverman) is a Christian who doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. This concept, incidentally, is the film’s best joke. Just so you know what level of sophistication we’re dealing with here.

While Albert is licking his wounds, notorious outlaw Clinch Leatherwood* (Liam Neeson) relieves a prospector of his gold and his life. Clinch is riding with his wife Anna (Charlize Theron) and his gang. Tired of Anna’s continual haranguing (how dare she imply that robbery can be done without murder?), he entrusts her to the care of Lewis (Evan Jones), his loyal but knuckled-headed right-hand-man, instructing them to hole up in the township of Old Stump while he and the boys investigate the prospector’s stake.

Lewis instigates a bar fight during his first night in town and is promptly arrested. Albert saves Anna during the fracas (though later events indicate that she’d have handled herself pretty fine) and the two strike up an unlikely friendship which shades towards romance. When they encounter Louise and her new suitor, the oleaginous Foy (Neil Patrick Harris, stealing the show), Anna colludes in a scenario which sees Albert challenge Foy to a duel. There’s only one problem: Albert’s scared shitless and doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other.

Actually, two problems. But y’all knew Clinch was going to reappear at a crucial moment, didn’t you?

‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ clings to a predictable sequence of narrative beats, the better to send them up. Clinch is a film-long riff on Jack Palance in ‘Shane’. Louise floats around dreamily in frills an a bonnet like Grace Kelly in ‘High Noon’. Ruth’s place of employment could well be the cathouse Hildy works at in ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’. Theron’s Anna is halfway between Jane Fonda’s Cat Ballou and the Waco Kid in ‘Blazing Saddles’ if the Waco Kid were a smoking hot blonde and didn’t have a drink problem.

Speaking of ‘Blazing Saddles’, the doffed hat scene is replicated, albeit not in honour of Randolph Scott but the withdrawing from a wallet of paper money (“take your hat off, boy, that’s a dollar bill!”), while the beanfeast transmogrifies here into an extended skit on bowel movements and the availability of cowboy hats.**

(To watch ‘Blazing Saddles’ straight after ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ is to laugh longer and harder at a film that runs a good twenty minutes shorter.)

MacFarlane’s film has two things working against it, and they work against it for much of its running time. The first is MacFarlane as actor. Whereas Albert in ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ and John in MacFarlane’s previous film ‘Ted’ are both emotionally retarded loser douchebags, John is played with a kind of coach potato rumpled charm by Mark Wahlberg. MacFarlane gives a one-note performance that lacks any of Wahlberg’s grace notes. (And seriously, folks, when “not as good as Mark Wahlberg” emerges as a critical touchstone, you know something is awry.) The second problem is the script’s dependency on scatological humour. The hat scene is low-brow but funny until MacFarlane decides to point the camera at what’s in the hat. An early scene involving shadow puppetry recycles a gag that was only funny in ‘Ted’ because of the absurdity of having a plush teddy bear enact it. The nadir involves an enuretic sheep.*** 

Mercifully, the film has enough moments where the humour’s earned to leave it not without merit. The Edward/Sarah subplot hits the target more often than it misses; a running joke about the arbitrariness of death in the west sets up some cynically effective sight gags; an unexpected musical number about moustaches turns a generic barn-dance into a triumph of kitsch; an Indian encampment scene in which Albert takes hallucinogenics and “sees” his future combines Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali (subject of art, Albert’s parents present a joyously foul-mouthed anti-Rockwell tableau); a ‘Back to the Future Part III’ homage earns kudos for how randomly its incorporated; and an end-credits coda proves spot-on bloody perfect.

‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ is no classic – in fact, at least half of its running time functions on the level of okayish – but when it works (particularly in its last half hour) it achieves a demented energy. Ironically enough, this generally happens when MacFarlane quits self-reflexively referencing other movies and does his own thing instead.



*I told you it was unsophisticated. 

**Seriously, I told you. 

***See above.

The Grey

At the beginning of ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’, weary saddle-tramp Hogue (Jason Robards) finds himself betrayed and left to die in the blistering desert. He implores God, “Yesterday I told you I was thirsty and I thought you might turn up some water! Now if I’ve sinned, you just send me a drop or two and I won’t do it no more. Whatever in the hell it was I did. I mean that, Lord.”

Towards the end of ‘The Grey’, beleaguered company man Ottway (Liam Neeson), lost in the Alaskan wilderness and hunted by a pack of wolves, sends out this little homily to the Almighty: “Do something, you phony prick. Fraudulent motherfucker. Do something. Come on, prove it! Fuck faith – earn it! Show me something real. I need it now, not later. Now! Show me and I’ll believe in you until the day I die, I swear. I’m calling on you.”

In ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’, the vengeful but likeable Hogue finds water. In ‘The Grey’, the nothing-to-live-for Ottway is answered only by the tallness of the trees, the vastness of the sky and an overwhelmingly indifferent silence. “Fuck it,” he ruminates, forcing himself onwards, “I’ll do it myself.”

If ‘Hogue’ is the closest Sam Peckinpah ever came to a religious allegory, then Joe Carnahan’s ‘The Grey’ is a wintry blast of existentialism. Still, it shares some aesthetic territory with Peckinpah. There are explicit similarities, particularly when one character expires against the majesty of the age-old mountains in a shot that purposefully quotes the final scene of ‘Ride the High Country’.

And there are implicit parallels, most notably in that both filmmakers demonstrate a keen understanding of how men behave and interact; of the macho codes that simultaneously protect their sense of self-identity and threaten to tear them apart whilst under pressure.

Peckinpah’s film opens with Hogue stripped of his rifle and canteen of water by his so-called partners Bowen (Strother Martin) and Taggart (L.Q. Jones). The rifle’s immaterial except that he might have defended himself with it. The water delineates the difference between two of them living and three of them dying before they make it out of the desert. But Hogue survives and the next act of the film sees him become a property-owner, a businessman and a publican thanks to the discovery of water where there shouldn’t have been any, his success flourishing almost accidentally while he broods on the possibility of getting even with Bowen and Taggart. His sentiments thaw somewhat as he romances saloon girl Hildy (Stella Stevens), but he never fully commits and things sour between them.

Ottway, on the other hand, is introduced to us having lost love. His wife has died, he’s ended up a paid killer of wolves for a petroleum conglomerate, mired in a grim company town populated by braggarts, brawlers and bullshitters. He is, put it mildly, at the end of his tether. Five minutes in, having written (or rather orated, in voiceover) a letter to his beloved, he’s crouching over his rifle, the barrel in his mouth. A wolf howling in the distance makes him hesitate. Plus, it’d be an awfully short film if he went the “goodnight Vienna” route.

Instead he finds himself on a plane with a cluster of noisy stevedores and it’s a genuine surprise when the plane goes down because surely all of that testosterone should have kept it up indefinitely. But plummet from the sky it does and suddenly “cluster of noisy stevedores” thins out to “small band of survivors”. Masculine ciphers – the huntsman, the loquacious smart-ass, the myopic nerve-bag, the ex-con – are gradually revealed as actual people. There’s an astounding scene, very shortly after the crash, where Ottway tends to a badly injured co-worker, and unable to help him medically, basically talks him through the fact that he’s going to die and do so very shortly. It’s a scene that most of mainstream directors working today would have fucked up in any number of different ways – pitched just a tad either way it could have toppled into cloying sentiment or callous indifference – but Neeson’s gravitas and Carnahan’s unobtrusive, observational style of direction combine and hold the moment in perfect equilibrium.

Ottway emerges as de facto leader almost immediately, though he’s challenged more than once. His first assertion of authority is when the bullish Diaz (Frank Grillo) starts rifling through his dead colleagues’ wallets and pocketing the cash. The following exchange occurs:

Ottway: Put that back. We’re not looting dead bodies for swag.
Diaz: You got lucky today, Ottway. You should be lying there with them. Don’t push it.
Ottway: I’m not going to say it again.
Diaz: Motherfucker, take a big step back.
Ottway: I’m going to start beating the shit out of you in the next five seconds. And you’re going to swallow a lot of blood for a fucking billfold.

Or how about Diaz’s assertion later, when the wolves appear and their continued existence starts looking less and less likely, that “I don’t walk through this world with fear in my heart” – Ottway’s response is a curt enquiry as to whether he learned that homily in prison: “Did someone write it on the dayroom wall?” Diaz is mouthy twat for so much of the film that the viewer could easily start rooting for the wolves. Yet he is gifted with – and, in the final analysis, deserves – one of the film’s most poignant scenes.

In addition to the Peckinpahesque examination of masculine codes and the jewel-like moments wherein Diaz and others find their humanity, ‘The Grey’ is also a bloody good thriller. A vertiginous rope crossing over an abyss is executed with Hitchcockian aplomb, the camera hanging back from the cliff edge until the one member of the party with a serious fear of heights takes his turn, at which point a dizzying POV shot demonstrates exactly what he has to be scared about.

Likewise, the wolves’ predatory behaviour is suspensefully developed. Their first appearance is almost ghostly: a pair of eyes emerging from the darkness around the crashed aircraft … joined by another … then another … then suddenly the screen is full of them. Later, bivouacked around campfire, human argument and animosity (Ottway and Diaz are at each others’ throats) is thrown into sudden and brutal relief as howling erupts from all around them.

At its best – in the way a horror film is often at its best when keeping the monster unseen – ‘The Grey’ wrings maximum chills from suggesting the wolves’ presence rather than launching across the screen. (A comment on the animatronics: it seems a lazy choice when even a low-budgeter like ‘Burning Bright’ can be bothered to harness the physical threat of a real tiger … but it’s preferable, at least in the opinion of an old fogey like me, to CGI.)

The horror movie comparison bears out in terms of structure. The second half of the film is marked by dwindling numbers, a stalk ‘n’ slash opus with wild animals and inhospitable terrain instead of a mad axeman and a dark cellar. And as the best horror movies essentially play on the fears we never managed to shake off from childhood, Ottway’s internal journey (its arc in ragged but emotionally persuasive juxtaposition to his journey through the wilderness) finds him back with memories not of his late wife but of his father. A drunk, as Ottway remembers him – moreover, a maudlin one with a taste for poetry. More than once Ottway quotes a poem of his father’s composition. It seems like a palimpsest, the Robert Frost-like repeated last lines suggesting a longer work. Maybe nobody’s life ever stretches to the completion of their endeavours, not Ottway’s, not his father’s, certainly not his wife’s.

Once more into the fray
Into the last good fight I’ll ever know
Live and die on this day
Live and die on this day

Thus the poem, thus the words Ottway arms himself with when the time comes to stand his ground. Another poem comes to mind, a stanza from Tennyson’s ‘In Memorial A.H.H.’:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

On so many levels, ‘The Grey’ is an upending, a subversion of the first two lines of that stanza (weigh up “who trusted God was love indeed” with Ottway’s bereavement and his imploration to the Almighty quoted at the beginning of this review) – and a visceral exercise in proving the last two. It’s a brutally existential thriller that debates Tennyson while getting in touch with its inner Peckinpah. I can’t think of many movies you can say that about.

Taken

Who are your favourite big screen tough guys? Bogart? Cagney? Eastwood? Maybe the muscle men action hero types: Stallone, Schwarzenegger, van Damme? The martial arts brigade, perhaps: Lee, Li, Chan? How about heroic bloodshed poster boy Chow Yuen Fat? Takeshi Kitano?

No doubt all of them would stake their claim to the title. So let’s leave them queuing up outside the Movie Tough Guy Club while Liam Neeson strolls right in with a VIP pass, a fucking big gun, a thousand-yard stare and a palpable disinclination to put up with anybody’s shit.

On the basis of ‘Taken’ alone – although there are plentiful indicators in his back catalogue, from ‘Darkman’ to ‘Batman Begins’ – Liam Neeson is the big screen tough guy I’d want in my corner if the chips were down and the bullets were flying.

‘Taken’ – directed by Pierre Morel from a script by co-written by Gaellic genre factory Luc Besson – gives us Neeson as Bryan Mills, a former secret service operative estranged from his high-maintenance wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and doing his best to be there for his seventeen year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and resenting the pull on her affections exerted by millionaire step-father Stuart (Xander Berkeley).

When Kim decides she wants to travel to Paris with her school friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) – a trip devoid of adult supervision – Stuart and Lenore blithely okay it. Mills, however, is dubious. Lenore and Kim pressure him and reluctantly he consents to the trip. His worst fears are confirmed during Kim’s first night on French soil when she and Amanda are abducted by Albanian gangster types who supply brothels with doped up American girls and auction off the better looking abductees to Arab sheikhs. (And, yes, the depiction of said foreign nationals is every bit as stereotyped as that last sentence implies.)

Mills is on the phone to Kim when the Albanians come calling and the connection remains unbroken long enough for him to deliver this little homily: “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

This is the point at which Liam Neeson becomes the Angel of fuckin’ Vengenace. There’s a lot of actors who would have made a meal of that monologue; delivered it through clenched teeth. Neeson delivers it with the cool deadly formality of someone who would rip your heart out and serve it to you on a skewer rammed into your scrotum rather than look at you. Someone would won’t break a sweat at doing such a thing, nor consider it particularly excessive. Remember that line Michael Caine has in ‘Get Carter’ before he decks the fat bloke: “You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. With me, it’s a full-time job.” Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills as the kind of guy for whom it’s a full-time job.

‘Taken’ unfolds with all the grim determination of its protagonist. Such criticisms as can be levelled – twenty-somethings Grace and Cassidy don’t quite convince as naïve teenagers; Holly Valance is bland in a supporting role; the bad guys are one-dimensional – are hardly valid when ‘Taken’ not only achieves exactly what it sets out to do (ie. serve as a delivery system for action scenes), but does so with such honesty, immediacy and lack of pretentiousness that its plethora of chases (vehicular and pedestrian), shoot-outs and hand-to-hand smack-downs add up to a full-throttle action/revenge movie that make most examples of its ilk look tired and anaemic by comparison. ‘Taken’ is about as good as this kind of movie gets.