Wild Wild West (1999)

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Starring Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Salma Hayek, Ted Levine, M. Emmet Walsh, Bai Ling, Musetta Vander, Frederique Van Der Wal. [PG-13]

Resurrection of the 1960s Western/spy-fi TV series for the big screen is the definition of event-movie-as-soulless-product—re-team a superstar and a director who made a summer smash together a couple years earlier (Men in Black), release it on the same holiday weekend, assimilate as many media/corporate tie-ins as possible, and spend a crapload of money doing it, all for the purposes of getting an even bigger crapload of money in return. They forgot to give audiences what they wanted, however, so it didn’t work (I mean, really didn’t work). Will Smith is a swaggering, shoot-first kind of Western hero and Kevin Kline is a gun-allergic, master-of-disguise federal agent, and together they’re a desperately unfunny and disengaged team battling a legless ex-Confederate (Branagh) bent on forcing President Grant (also played by Kline) to surrender the United States to his new world order. Whether in the Oval Office or on a modified train or out in the wilderness with magnetized metal collars strapped around their necks, the heroes’ relentless bickering takes up probably twenty to thirty minutes of the movie, so when it becomes clear it’s never going to work between them, all that’s left to do is hope for some fun action and special effects…pity those sequences are so lame-brained, they operate on the assumption that being cartoonish and gargantuan automatically translates to entertainment value (producer Jon Peters and his damn obsession with a giant spider, yeesh…). Smith and Branagh trade racist/ableist one-liners with each other to dead air and derision, multiple sequences try to make light of black lynchings (oh, boy, that’s funny…), and pretty much every gadget/gimmick that gets trotted out is followed swiftly by a wheeze of fatigue. Since “blockbuster returns” was the only thing that mattered to any of the decision-makers, no one bothered to admit the screenplay was a disaster in all phases of construction/structure (likely rewritten to death during the lengthy development phase), but after the light turned green, did no one involved at any stage of production raise objections that nothing was working? Even as eye candy in a few saloon-va-voom numbers, there is no reason whatsoever for Salma Hayek’s character to even be in this movie—just another recognizable name/face to put on the poster and sell some tickets. Elmer Bernstein composed the score, which incorporates Richard Markowitz’s title theme from the show.

16/100