director
Barry Sonnenfeld
screenwriters
S.S. Wilson
Brent Maddock
Jeffrey Price
Peter S. Seaman
story by
Jim Thomas
John Thomas
producers
Jon Peters
Barry Sonnenfeld
cinematographers
Michael Ballhaus
Stefan Czapsky
music
Elmer Bernstein
editor
Jim Miller
cast
Will Smith (Capt. James West)
Kevin Kline (Artemus Gordon)
Kenneth Branagh (Dr. Arliss Loveless)
Salma Hayek (Rita Escobar)
M. Emmet Walsh (Coleman)
Ted Levine (General 'Bloodbath' McGrath)
Frederique Van Der Wal (Amazonia)
Musetta Vander (Munitia)
Ling Bai (Miss East)
Rodney A. Grant (Hudson)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 107m
u.s.
release: June 30, 1999
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
Official
website
other barry
sonnenfeld films
reviewed on this website:
- Big
Trouble
- Men
in Black
- Men
in Black II
|
When
reviewing a bad movie -- even a movie as wall-to-wall awful as
Wild Wild West -- one tries to come up with something
good to talk about. Something. Anything. No movie is completely
bereft of good points, right? I can report that I chuckled once
-- once -- during the 107 minutes of Wild Wild West, but
the rest of the film is so terrible that I no longer remember
exactly what it was that tickled me. So this is not so much a
review as an inquiry into memory, as I attempt to recover the
one tiny redeeming virtue, the needle in a shitstack.
Was it Will Smith who made me laugh? No, and that surprised me,
because I've found him funny since Fresh Prince of Bel Air,
and he made Independence
Day and Men
in Black -- his previous two July 4 blockbusters -- bearable.
Here, playing smooth government agent James West, he seems to
have entered the arrogant territory of Eddie Murphy circa 1987.
Smith shows little or no comic timing here; he basically shoots
or bluffs his way through every scene, an 1869 cowboy version
of Axel Foley. One scene that could have been funny, when West
tries to get out of being hanged by a white lynch mob, instead
sits there on the screen and dies of lameness. West comes up
with some weak rationale for playfully slapping a woman's breasts,
then attempts to deconstruct the word "redneck," and
you sit there wondering how any of the dozens of people involved
in the film failed to point out the simple fact that this scene
isn't funny.
Okay, what about Kevin Kline? He's usually reliable. Not here,
he isn't. As the eccentric inventor and master of disguise Artemus
Gordon, Kline appears in unconvincing drag and has a slew of
gizmos stuffed up his sleeve like a 19th-century Inspector Gadget.
Since we never actually see Gordon inventing or building anything,
we're that much more aware that his character doesn't exist without
the help of the film's large team of FX techies. He reminded
me of the title character in Dr.
Giggles, who also had a variety of outlandish gizmos
with no explanation of where they came from; and when a $100-million-plus
movie reminds you of Dr. Giggles, it is in serious trouble.
Gordon is also allegedly smart and witty, and in a good example
of the film's level of humor, he comes up with a name for his
new flying machine: "Air Gordon." That's the sort of
almost-a-joke that is the movie's main currency.
"Oh, come now," you may say, "surely Kenneth Branagh
provides some amusing moments and goosed a laugh or two out of
you." Nope. Sorry. Branagh turns up as evil genius Dr. Arliss
Loveless (also legless), and he is to this movie what Sean Connery
was to The
Avengers. "I'll do this crappy summer movie as a
lark," I imagine Branagh saying to himself, "cash the
check, make a bigger name for myself in American multiplexes,
and maybe even get my own action figure. Should be a good laugh."
Again: nope, sorry. Actually (ironically), it's a testament to
Branagh's integrity that he is so bad here, because it
turns out he can't fake it; his disgust towards the material
sometimes shows (and, consummate pro that he is, he tries to
use it as Loveless' disgust towards the heroes). Near the end,
when his torso is attached to four mechanical spider legs, I
felt I was witnessing the logical conclusion of summer wrecks
like this one: take a vibrant actor and turn him into a CGI effect.
All right, so how about Barry Sonnenfeld? Isn't he a good comedy
director? Well, the evidence grows less clear with each movie.
I was a wholehearted fan of his two Addams Family films,
but in retrospect those movies may have owed more to the casting
and the writing touch of professional madcap Paul Rudnick. Get
Shorty, for me, was an enjoyable but thin movie that essentially
took the Elmore Leonard book and filmed it; the later Out
of Sight was ten times the film Get Shorty was.
And I was never a fan of the juvenile, overstuffed Men in
Black. In Wild Wild West, Sonnenfeld goes further
into blockbuster incoherence -- the most memorable character
is the 80-foot bionic tarantula -- and he doesn't shape the scenes
or assemble them in any kind of rhythm. He just puts up a scene
that doesn't work, then kills it quickly and rushes ahead to
the next scene that doesn't work. Every scene is also edited
with a Cuisinart; the result feels like Silverado directed
by Joel Schumacher and rewritten by morons.
Salma Hayek? She's in it for a total of like 12 minutes. Sorry,
guys.
At this point I am reduced to thinking about the supporting players
in my attempt to uncover what it was that made me chuckle. M.
Emmet Walsh as the conductor of Artemis' gizmo-laden train, the
Wanderer? Nope. Ted Levine (The
Silence of the Lambs), unrecognizable as a scruffy villain
named Bloodbath McGrath? No -- but aha! He does appear
in the scene that made me chuckle. I remember now. See, McGrath's
ear was blown off, and he has a horn-shaped earpiece sticking
out of his head where his ear once was. He gets killed and falls,
and a little white dog runs over. The pooch poses next to the
earhorn, looking like the dog in the Victrola ads. Ha ha ha!
Well, okay, so it's not that much of a knee-slapper, but
with a dud like Wild Wild West you take whatever you can
get. |