A Million Ways to Die in the West opens with five minutes of opening credits superimposed over glorious shots of American desert landscape. No jokes. Just a boisterous score, shots of the desert, and people’s names.

That’s basically how the rest of the movie went as well.

Okay, fine. There were jokes. A few great ones too. But the core of the movie isn’t centered around the jokes. It revolves around a sometimes ultra-straightforward story that happens to be set in the old-timey west. To make a long, nearly two hour story short, Seth MacFarlane’s Albert Stark (no relation) gets broken up with by Amanda Seyfried’s Louise, which really bums out the former. Then Charlize Theron’s Anna comes along, sent by Liam Neeson as “he’s definitely the bad guy” Clinch Leatherwood, and she teaches Stark all about shootin’ and fightin’ and lovin’.

You can probably correctly guess how the entire film will unfold based on the trailers. This stroke of misfortune is not the film’s fault whatsoever, but the film’s puzzlingly low joke count didn’t help out the trailer editing people that much either.

Mind you, the actual gags are top notch. It’s just the long stretches between them that make the scenes feel longer and more unnecessary by the minute. The connective tissue between the film’s set pieces are all played straight, dwelling in the drama of the moment, sometimes in direct conflict with what any of the characters want.

Since we spend so much time with these characters in scenes like this, it would be nice to be able to track where they’re coming from, or understand them enough to identify a sense of who they are through their actions. Aside from the nice-guy-coward that challenges people to fights for no reason, the lawbreaker that just now realizes that her husband (the most brutal and notorious gunslinger in the west) is kind of a jerk, and the virgin that’s in a committed relationship with a hooker, there’s also…well…a hooker that isn’t ready to break her Christian vows of chastity until marriage.

And you know, the characters themselves are jokes, they’re meant to be funny and nonsensical, but when half the movie is played straight, it’s hard to appreciate them for what they are. I honestly half-expected to be treated to a six-minute scene dedicated to the relationship issues between the virgin and the hooker. Maybe an off-handed joke at the four minute mark to even things out. Although the desire to get us invested in the characters is admirable, all that it does is delay the comedy portion of the film ’til later. When Seth is on screen.

MacFarlane charms in his first real silver-screen appearance and shows that he has the potential to extend his fame well past his well-established Family Guy roots. His sense of comedic timing was able to build him an empire, and when he uses his powers for good, he’s able to bring the house down with laughter. It’s also nice to actually see his voice coming out of his face for once.

In fact, everyone seems to be coming in at the top of their game. Neil Patrick Harris especially manages to up the level of physical comedy to a new level in one of the film’s funniest scenes, illustrating one of MacFarlane’s trademark “and they do that for like thirty seconds” gags that we can recognize from Family Guy and American Dad.

His character is the owner of the town’s Mustachery, and also the wooer of Stark’s girlfriend. We see glimpses of Barney from How I Met Your Mother, some intentional, some not so, but his inspired delivery and always above-par interpretation of his character helped to give a real sense of life to the film’s character repertoire. While we’re on the subject, how did neither Neil nor Seth actually sing The Mustache Song?!

There are also a handful of truly inspired cameo appearances, some of which have been spoiled in TV spots (again, not the fault of the film whatsoever, but I just saw a TV spot that has a scene that isn’t even in the movie), and some of which have been kept very well under wraps. Many of these segments felt like they could’ve been inserted anywhere in the film, but that’s just MacFarlane’s cut-in-cut-out sense of humor, and it actually works.

If you go to see A Million Ways to Die in the West, you’ll definitely laugh at something. The number of laughs you’ll get for your dollar unfortunately didn’t seem to factor into the writing of the script, but there’s a big enough range of different gags to offer up a moderately good time for just about any type of person as long as they’re not offended by bodily fluids and sheep penises.

Grade: C-

Rated: R (for strong crude and sexual content, language throughout, some violence and drug material)

A Million Ways to Die in the West opens in theaters on May 30.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you plan on seeing the film, we recommend not watching this trailer if you haven’t seen it already.