`Wild, Wild West” is a wild, wanton and wasteful western farce that’s so overblown and underwritten it almost makes you cringe to watch it. Sitting through this movie — another crazily expensive superspectacle based on another dubious “well-loved” old TV series — is often like trying to be entertained at an antique blimp race where huge multicolored dirigibles keep regularly crashing to earth.
What are Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh — not to mention Salma Hayek — doing in this lavish, rib-nudging farrago? And what are director Barry Sonnenfeld (“Men in Black”) and Michael Ballhaus (“Goodfellas”) doing filming it? Surely nobody could have held out much hope for a script like this — with its prat-falling drag jokes, creepy-crawly robot monsters and mad scientists trying to kidnap President U.S. Grant as he drives the spike for the transcontinental railroad. Or did they?
The movie strives to be gargantuan western camp, and it does have a gorgeous overall look. But despite entertaining moments here and there, “Wild, Wild West” is a kind of blot on the escutcheons of some of the more talented actors and filmmakers in modern Hollywood.
The source, of course, is the ’60s TV series: a spoof spy western that, beginning in 1965, tried to pump James Bond movie tricks, sex and gadgetry into the usual buddy-western plot lines. The series starred Bob Conrad as secret agent James T. West and Ross Martin as master-of-disguise sidekick Artemus Gordon. Those are the two roles played here by Smith and Kline, and they aren’t bad — which, given the awfulness of most of the script, amounts to a triumph over extreme provocation.
But Hayek suffers as sultry love interest Rita Escobar. And Branagh and Ted Levine have been given a couple of dastardly villain parts — Confederate madman Arliss Loveless and Gen. “Bloodbath” McGrath — that make Warner Brothers’ cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn look like a miracle of subtlety by comparison.
The script credits (or blames) six writers (including the teams responsible for the “Short Circuit” and “Predator” series). It begins by showing West and Gordon supposedly meeting for the first time — in the Washington office of President Grant (also Kline). Then, it sends them after madman Loveless, bent like the TV bad guys before him, on a ludicrous campaign of slaughter and world domination. The legless Loveless races around in a motorized wheelchair and is such a homicidal maniac he kills hundreds of his own men to test his new weaponry. Branagh plays this part with a slightly Bill Clintonish accent that makes you wonder if he didn’t really want the Clinton part in “Primary Colors,” opposite his ex-wife Emma Thompson.
Assisting Loveless is the almost equally maniacal McGrath, who sports a silly looking RCA gramophone horn over his amputated ear, along with a bevy of murderous and mostly non-speaking lovelies (Bai Ling as Miss East, Frederique Van Der Wal as Amazonia and Musetta Vander as Munitia). As in the TV show, West and Gordon have lots of gadgets, derringers and a luxury train at their disposal (including a pool table and the exploding billiard balls from the TV series). And they keep racing around the John Fordian desert on railroad tracks — or, later on, in Loveless’ demonic invention, an 80-foot-long robot tarantula that seems to have been inspired by the huge Walkers of “The Empire Strikes Back.”
I’m no partisan of the original TV “Wild, Wild West,” which is based on a fairly silly idea and had a star, Conrad, whose forte was definitely not light comedy or droll innuendo. (There’s a campy edge to Conrad’s fashion-plate machismo, but he almost completely lacks the delicious kidding style of James Garner in the comic western “Maverick” or, for that matter, of Sean Connery in the Bond movies.)
But the original “West” was handsomely produced, for a ’60s TV western, and it could provide mild, pseudo-stylish diversion. This movie wallows in style, drowns in it. It’s so overdressed and over-produced that the barroom bordellos look like museums and the train looks like the Ritz Hotel. As for that new Hollywood staple, deliberately tasteless humor, “West” offers us numerous unfunny jokes about Loveless’ amputated legs, West’s cockiness and Gordon’s fake bosoms before concocting a scene where the two heroes fall into what looks like a lake of manure.
The tastelessness doesn’t extend to the sex: Conrad’s West was a sagebrush Casanova but Smith isn’t given much beyond an opening romp in a water tower; and Hayek’s Rita might best be described as “All show and no go.” It’s also a stretch to imagine the handsome and insolent Smith as a secret agent among a group of ex-Confederates, especially since the script gives him almost nothing but snappy insults.
Smith and Kline are two expert comic actors who usually get any laughs reasonably within reach — and a few that aren’t. And Smith has given the movie a really zippy rap title song. But they’re basically swimming together in a lake of mud or manure here. As for Branagh, one can only hope he was paid enough to start up another Shakespeare movie. (“All’s Well That Ends Well” perhaps?) But watching actors this good chew over lines this lousy is truly dispiriting.
Will audiences enjoy it anyway? I suspect they might — and at least the movie is probably better than any single episode of the TV series. But what does that prove? What a witless new movie genre this is, making big TV-series ripoff pictures simply because they’re pre-sold and pre-marketed? It’s a horrible development: ridiculously overproduced movies based on TV series that were “beloved” mostly because you got to see them for free.
Ironically, Sonnenfeld is one of the few directors who got good results from this genre, with the “Addams Family” movies. But he hits a wall here, and it’s also depressing to think that “Wild, Wild West” is the last big audience movie western of the century, in a decade that saw the genre (with “Dances With Wolves” and “Unforgiven”) briefly and promisingly revived.
The western deserves better. So do Smith, Kline and Branagh. So do Hayek and Sonnenfeld. And maybe even, heaven help us, so does “The Wild, Wild West.”
”WILD, WILD WEST”
(star) (star)
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld; written by S.S. Wilson, Brent Maddock, Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman; photographed by Michael Ballhaus; edited by Jim Miller; production designed by Bo Welch; music by Elmer Bernstein; produced by Jon Peters, Sonnenfeld. A Warner Bros. release; opens Wednesday. Running time: 1:47. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
James T. West ……………… Will Smith
Artemus Gordon …………….. Kevin Kline
Dr. Arliss Loveless ………… Kenneth Branagh
Rita Escobar ………………. Salma Hayek
Gen. “Bloodbath” McGrath ….. Ted Levine
Miss East …………………. Bai Ling
