Wild Wild West Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)July 1st, 1999
WILD WILD WEST
(Warner Bros.)
Starring: Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Salma Hayek, Ted Levine.
Screenplay: S. S. Wilson & Brent Maddock and Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman.
Producers: Jon Peters and Barry Sonnenfeld.
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, violence, adult humor, profanity) Running Time: 105 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
There are three ways you can go when you adapt a television series for film. You can poke fun, which worked well with the BRADY BUNCH films. You can play it straight, which worked well with THE UNTOUCHABLES. Or you can pump it up with cinematic steroids, which has crashed and burned THE AVENGERS, THE MOD SQUAD, LOST IN SPACE, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, etc. In their zeal to dust off beloved small screen properties for the big screen, producers often have ignored everything that made those properties beloved in the first place. The nostalgia card only plays so far, after all -- if you want to bring in the kids, you've got to blow more stuff up.
There was every reason to suspect that WILD WILD WEST would be the latest T.V. charmer-turned-blockbuster monstrosity. Producer Jon Peters was renowned for embracing the "too much isn't nearly enough" ethos, and word of disastrous test screenings had been leaking out of Hollywood for a few months. As it turns out, WILD WILD WEST is only part monstrosity and part faithful re-creation, with neither approach working nearly as well as it should.
The principals are once again James West (Will Smith) and Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline), Federal agents circa 1869. West, an Army investigator, is a man of action; U. S. Marshal Gordon is an intellectual inventor and master of disguise. The two clashing personalities are teamed up at the insistence of President Grant (also played by Kline) to find out who is kidnapping scientists and threatening to overthrow the government. The trail leads to Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), an embittered former Confederate scientist determined to take out on the United States the loss of the lower half of his body in an experiment gone awry.
There are at least a few hints that director Barry Sonnenfeld is interested in evoking tongue-in-cheek spirit of the series. The main title sequence includes the familiar tinted freeze-frames, the protagonists still travel in their private train the Wanderer, and the grand plans of the maniacal villain are appropriately maniacal. The film also hooks in to the series' anachronistic satire of James Bond-like secret agent hijinks, which turns into a surprising problem. In 1965, it was fresh to watch Artemus play fussy Q to West's brawling Bond, fresh to watch an adventure self-aware of adventure genre conventions. In 1999, hip referentiality just isn't hip any more, especially when it comes to manly action heroes and their toys. When Will Smith's character introduces himself as "West...James West," it should play as a winking homage. Instead, it just feels tired.
When WILD WILD WEST doesn't work as a straight return to the gimmicks and goofs of the series, there's always the bombastic special effects route. Gadgetry and megalomania were common elements of the series, but a computer-rendered 80-foot-tall mechanized tarantula-tank doesn't have quite the same low-tech appeal. The overkill isn't even restricted to the special effects, with Salma Hayek's va-va-voom appeal wasted for no other reason than a little bare flesh. And when the script is in need of an easy joke, there's always Smith knowingly fending off Southern racism. Branagh seems to understand the theatrical hamminess required for Loveless, pitching the character as cartoonish as he can be. His cartoonish henchmen and henchwomen, on the other hand, are a waste of time and fight choreography.
WILD WILD WEST is so frantic that it spends too little time on its strongest asset, the interplay between Smith and Kline. Both actors have fine comic timing, and both play up the rivalry between the gunslinger and the deep thinker. There are more enjoyable comic moments in WILD WILD WEST than I was expecting, thanks to Sonnenfeld's sometimes surreal comic touch (references to E. T. and the RCA Victor dog). He just bounces back and forth too often between approaches to the material. It's uneven as throwback entertainment, and it's uneven as contemporary action film -- a wild wild mess of a movie that shows the danger of playing around with previously successful material, no matter how you try to play it.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 whirled series: 5.
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