Rolling Stone May 30, 2014 But for all its hit-and-miss jokes, there are lots of ways to die laughing at this Western raunchfest.
MacFarlane is a very funny dude, and there are times "A Million Ways to Die" is indeed funny. But too often the movie feels half-baked.
If you measure a comedy by how many times you laughed, Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West, at least for me, is&nbs...
Plot details can be scattershot, but it succeeds thanks to an outrageously comical deconstruction of Hollywood Westerns and an appealing cast of ch...
If MacFarlane was hoping to make a new generation’s "Blazing Saddles," he failed amid an avalanche of dumb.
If you grade a comedy by how frequently you chuckle, then A Million Ways to Die in the West is funny enough; too often, unfortunately, Ma...
Some of the gags do land – maybe one in four. But the genre-parody genre with big stars and poop jokes needs a little more class than Mac...
Importation of modern sensibilities into olden times is the gimmick, but now and then, MacFarlane forgets himself and just has fun. Once or twice...
Yes, there are a million ways to die in the west. Boredom shouldn’t be one of them.
Some of it sputters, settling for smiles instead of laughs, and much of it flounders while the slapdash script searches, at exhausting length, for...
New York Post May 28, 2014 MacFarlane is just passable as a leading man, but as a director and co-writer with two others he has a wider comic imagination than "Blaz...
Though the film is hardly laugh-free, its uneven jokes appear to have breezed through a very forgiving editing process.
The problem isn’t just that MacFarlane is a bad actor, but that Anna’s character makes absolutely no sense.
MacFarlane is after something beyond absurdity. He gets to the crux of the matter, that life in the West was cheap, at least as portrayed in the mo...
MacFarlane’s comedic approach has always been that of throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. It’s no different this time out...
Detroit News May 30, 2014 Feels more like an extended riff than a fully fleshed-out film.
An epic fail on every conceivable level.
Fart jokes are all too plentiful, along with copious references to bodily fluids, but in this zany context the film gets away with them. And the sc...
Seth MacFarlane takes a genuinely interesting premise, about how the Old West was a cesspool of disease and despair, and buries it (and h...
While the whole thing feels weirdly miscalculated to me, "A Million Ways to Die in the West" tweaks the formula just enough, delivers a few la...
Demolishes the heroic mystique of the Old West with the nose-thumbing glee of a rambunctious brat who has just crawled out of a fetid mud puddle.
The one person who gets the balance right, weighing parody and homage, is the composer, Joel McNeely, whose opening theme stirs hopes and memories...
MacFarlane has corralled a great cast, which makes it especially disappointing that the movie’s merely OK.
A lightweight attempt to emulate the satiric approach to the Western genre already perfected by Mel Brooks with "Blazing Saddles."
It’s another example of MacFarlane’s ability to mix poop jokes with romance, foul language with sweet sentiment, offensive humor with b...
If you want to find out how much scope the Old West contains for jokes about violent bowel movements, this is very much your movie.
Boston Globe May 29, 2014 There’s nothing about this plotline that doesn’t feel like a retread, and MacFarlane, I’m sorry to report, still seems like...
This movie feels like it has a million jokes, and every single one arrives with a lethal thud.
In A Million Ways to Die in the West, director-star Seth MacFarlane builds an imposing, affectionate reconstruction of the American movie West...
It is too long, too dumb, and too gross. But sometimes funny.
A flaccid all-star farce that’s handsomely dressed up with nowhere to go for most of its padded two-hour running time.
The problem isn’t that the jokes are crass; they’re just not that funny.
The Guardian May 29, 2014 Too enamoured of genre convention to reach for the comic dynamite.
Between the slapstick, pointless celebrity cameos, in-jokes and steady stream of feeble puns, the violence is surprisingly graphic.
Toronto Star May 29, 2014 Your mileage may vary depending on your enthusiasm for his smirking frat-boy comedy.
A Million Ways to Die in the West feels like about 80 minutes of material was padded out to 110 minutes.
TIME Magazine May 28, 2014 A sagebrush comedy whose visual grandeur and appealing actors get polluted by some astonishingly lazy writing.
A failure on nearly every level, "A Million Ways to Die in the West" almost approaches so-bad-you-need-to-see-it categorization.
The Guardian June 1, 2014 It’s essentially Blazing Saddles, only the fart jokes aren’t quite as fresh.
Like much of MacFarlane’s work, A Million Ways suffers from an inability to maintain consistent characters or to make plot funny.
All the whiny point-scoring is such an explicit appeal for audience sympathy that the dialogue feels derived from a malnourished stand-up rout...