Ranking Seth MacFarlane's Properties From Worst To Best

7. A Million Ways To Die In The West

It seems the urge to reinvent the Western genre for cinema comes around on a cycle as deliberately as the need to find the next Harry Potter. There have been some successes that suggest revisionism is the way forward, but it's been a long time since anyone thought the genre could be anything other than glum and grim (a safe spectrum where grit is a remarkably successful currency).

When you look at almost everything that sought a more "mainstream" appeal in the wake of Blazin' Saddles, it's like an embarrassing roll call of misfits and monsters. Wild Wild West was an abomination, but even if it hadn't been a paint-by-numbers turkey it probably wouldn't have worked, because audiences simply aren't in the right mind-step for western frolics.

Perhaps that's why A Milion Ways To Die In The West sought to be a little more modern, blending MacFarlane's irreverent humour with an old Western spirit. Except it failed on both accounts. The comedy is puerile and oddly sterile, while there's absolutely nothing authentic about the setting (which was precisely what worked for Blazin' Saddles).

Everyone seems game enough, but this is one that sits alongside Cutthroat Island on the pile marked Expensive Failed Genre Experiment.