Do you like Family Guy? I'm not a huge fan, but I expect people who are fans would really like this movie. It has a certain amount of very juvenile humor coupled with generic nerd and hypochondria with a bit of slapstick humor and jokes that are glancingly funny and get hammered into the ground by a script that assumes everyone loves hearing the same joke over and over again.
There is one version of the movie poster that proudly proclaims that it is "from the makers of TED" and that should have been a clue that this was not going to be a particularly cerebral kind of comedy. This was substantially better than Ted, but it suffers from some of the same flaws; this is even despite the large number of decent actors who are involved in it. The underlying problem is that, like Ted before it, this movie made money, and that just encourages these people to make more.
Seth MacFarlane has an almost Woody Alan style of neurotic acting that is enjoyable for some people. I feel it gets on my nerves pretty quickly, and I'm probably going to do my best to avoid it when I can. However, Charlize Theron shows up in this movie, and she is very attractive and has demonstrated significant acting chops, so I was happy about some of the acting by the characters on screen most of the time.
Charlize's husband is the outlaw played by Liam Neeson, and I understand he really wanted to play an Irish cowboy in a comedy, so he got his wish. His character isn't really much to talk about, but Liam plays the cardboard cutout of a bad guy well enough.
Giovanni Ribisi and Sarah Silverman play the best friend and his girlfriend who is the loud, annoying favorite town whore who has not yet had any kind of relations with her future husband. It's one of the jokes that gets hit so hard the whole time that you just wished the characters would die a horrible death quickly.
Oh hey, before I forget, Seth is a sheep farmer. He must be having sex with the sheep! I mean, he isn't, but what a funny joke to make! I could make it for like an hour and a half straight! In fact, I have an excellent example of exactly what that would look like. It is, as you may have guessed, this movie.
The story is unimaginative
Acting is okay (Neil Patrick Harris was terrible)
Dialog is okay
Production quality is good
Directing is meh
1.25/5