Lucy / A Million Ways To Die In The West

Time for a couple of disappointments from Luc Besson and Seth MacFarlane, though with Besson these days would you expect any different? Actually, when I was settling down to watch Lucy, I was thinking its been twenty years since Luc Besson made a decent film and though (in any art) if someone has produced credible past works we tend to forgive their crimes of the present, Leon seems a long time ago now. In fact, for anyone that's seen anything from Besson since that 1994 high point, you'll be unsurprised to hear that Lucy doesn't address the standard Besson stumbling blocks; that of poor acting, incomprehensible scripts and an over-abundance on (usually) poor special effects. What's doubly disappointing about Lucy though is that the first twenty minutes are a riot, what with Scarlett Johansson's innocent worker abroad being caught up in a drug deal and forced to become a mule by having a bag of synthetic drugs sewn into her abdomen. However when the bag bursts her body absorbs such a large quantity of the drug she begins to develop almost supernatural abilities. It's as silly as it sounds and Besson's films always require some serious suspension of disbelief in order to fully enjoy them, but Besson makes the foolish error of playing the whole thing straight faced meaning it becomes inanely nonsensical very quickly and then somehow just gets worse. There was a kernel of an idea in here somewhere, but it would take someone with significantly better skills that Besson to microwave it into something edible. To wit: Besson himself stated that it took ten years for him to get this to the result he put before us. Ten years and this rubbish was the final outcome? At least it's a short film, whereas Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways To Die In The West starts outstaying it's welcome about twenty minutes in...and there's still another 100 minutes to go. MacFarlane is an acquired taste no doubt, but even his biggest fan would be hard pressed to defend this over long mess of egotistical nonsense camouflaged as a film. For his second feature as director MacFarlane has settled on taking the star role himself, portraying a sheep farmer with a yellow streak a mile wide in late nineteenth century Arizona. Plot machinations mean he becomes involved with the wife (Charlize Theron) of a notorious outlaw (Liam Neeson), whilst also pining after his ex (Amanda Seyfried). MacFarlane throws as many gags (both verbal and visual) at the audience as he can, but virtually none of them find the target. It's not overly offensive (it's as juvenile as you'd expect from MacFarlane). It's just drastically unfunny. There is the very occasional chuckle and Neil Patrick Harris has some fun as a foppish toff, but each problematic road leads back to MacFarlane himself, all starting with the fact that he can't act for toffee and is horribly bland as the leading man. Perhaps its the years of doing voice work having got to him, but this is a horrible misjudgement from MacFarlane, not helped by his terrible direction. Scenes of improvisation, which any director worth his salt would have trimmed in the edit, drag on and on and the whole film suffers from MacFarlane's unfocused leadership and scratchy plot. A number of bizarre cameo's (Ryan Reynolds and Ewan McGregor among them) do little to suggest that this isn't just a jolly for MacFarlane and chums, and whilst it may have looked funny on paper, everyone here should be giving themselves a good talking too. Rating (for both): 3/10.