WILD WILD WEST
The horror...

This review is coming out way too late to dissuade anybody from seeing this movie - after a great opening weekend, word filtered out with record speed as to just how much of a crapwagon this movie is and it disappeared almost overnight.  I think Wild, Wild West is my personal choice for my favorite example of the summer blockbuster gone stark, raving mad and thank God it tanked.  Other people have other choices, but none of them suck on so many levels like this one does.  Godzilla may have been dumb as hell and way too long, but it actually delivered more than it promised - it promised a big lizard destroying Manhattan, and it delivered just that, with the military joining in the fun and destroying even more.  Armageddon might be awesomely bad, but it's hard to make fun of a movie that's laughing at you all the way to the bank.  Batman & Robin is possibly the most gravely misunderstood movie of the 90's - it's a work of genius, people.  It's terrible, but as a paean to bad taste and cheese, it's without peer.

  Wild, Wild West, on the other hand, will likely be my own cinematic whipping boy for a long time to come.  Here it is, the summer blockbuster run amuck; everything you didn't like about summer blockbusters is here and flaunted with appalling naivete - I can't even tell myself that it's supposed to be this bad like I can with B&R.  This is likely to serve well as a blueprint in the future, instructing filmmakers just how to not make a movie.

  Everything about this movie is bad, except for one laugh I got out of it, which I'll reveal at the end because I'm ashamed to have laughed at it.  Maybe I was just so desperate for a chuckle, I'd have laughed at anything at that point.  As I get into what's bad about this movie, I'll start before the beginning, all the way back to the trailers.

  As soon as the trailers popped up in theaters, WWW became a movie an awful lot of people just had it in for.  Lots of people thought the giant mechanical spider and various gizmos were way too silly and incongruous with the western setting; I didn't mind so much, and looked forward with glee to much giant mechanical spider death and destruction.  Some people thought casting Will Smith - who, if you haven't noticed, is black - in the lead was a bad choice, given racial attitudes and employment demographics (a federal agent, in this case) in the post-Civil War USA. (these people were right, but nobody could know just why yet)  But the gravest offender was the title song, performed by Smith (a mangling of some Stevie Wonder song) - a nauseatingly desperate attempt to duplicate the success of the "Men In Black" song.  Well, it sure duplicates something here - it's just as bad.  Who reading this hasn't pummeled the shit out of the DJ at the bar for playing this song too much, huh?  Don't feel bad, he probably deserved it for not learning his lesson when you beat the crap out of him for playing "Men In Black" too much two years ago.

  Every trailer, every ad, every radio spot...rarely has a hype machine been more well-tuned to revolt me.  It amazes me that this movie did as well as it did on its opening weekend; this many people were really looking forward to it?  Unbelievable.
 
Time lumbered forward toward the release date, director Barry Sonnenfeld for some reason blaming the internet for how poorly this movie was testing.  Still, that song grated.

  And then the movie opened, and the verdict was near-universal - this is a movie upon whose grave many of us will dance, because it's gonna suffer a much-deserved fate.

  Still, it took me two months to see it because I was waiting to catch it for a buck; besides, my critical standards drop when I go to the dollar theaters and I figured that this CAN'T POSSIBLY be as bad as I've heard.

  No, it's worse.

  All righty-tighty, here's the setup.

  Will Smith, as I said, stars, playing some sort of government agent named Jim West.  He teams up with Federal Marshal Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline), who happens to be a master of disguise and invention, to stop a legless madman named Arliss Loveless from killing the president and giving most of the USA back to Spain, France, and England.  Salma Hayek plays a scantily-clad woman who tags along to save her husband, a scientist who's been kidnapped by Loveless.  Ted Levine is also here as a mangled officer from the defeated South who has a conical sound-thingie welded to the side of his head, which is basically there to provide two sight gags, neither of which work.

Anybody whose regard for Smith is anything less than the reverence you'd regularly reserve for God (if you're religious, that is) will break out into hives watching him here.  This movie is a bigger ego-handjob for the guy than Kevin Costner could do for himself in a hundred three-hour self-directed post-apocalypse movies.  Jim West is shown as simply a god among men - perfect in every regard, from his cool wit ("No more Mr. Knife guy" comes to mind as an early nominee for worst one-liner of the year), his way with women, his skill in battle.  He only messes up once in the whole movie, when he can't think of a way that calling people rednecks might be a compliment.  James Bond, in his various incarnations, at least got a modicum of deservedness for such a portrayal by the fact that even Roger Moore never sang any of his movie's theme songs.  In short, when it comes to Smith in this movie, his fans will grow to hate him, and his non-fans will grow to hate him even more.  If there's some mysterious, cloak-wearing Slick Willie cult out there that worships him as a god, then maybe they'll like him here.

  Kevin Kline is just embarrassing, showing absolutely none of the comic talent he's frequently shown elsewhere.  He and Smith have zero comic chemistry anyway, and it's painful to watch people actually believe that he, in drag, is really a woman, especially when he talks like Miss Piggy. 

  Just why Kenneth Branagh is here when any number of other blockbuster projects offering about the same buckage must have been available, I don't know.  Not that it matters, he basically just lets his demento beard do most of his acting for him, occasionally cackling with a Southern accent, atrocious script never once doing him any favors.  For years, I've been defending his Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - it doesn't look so bad now, does it?  To see a performer of Branagh's talent in a role like this, in a movie like this, it hurts the eyes.  Lots of summer movies do this - take a hugely talented (often English) performer and cast him as the villain.  Wow, I don't think I've ever seen this convention flop quite as spectacularly as it does here.

  Salma Hayek gets nothing to do at all, one look at the top half of her bare ass somehow, SOMEHOW managing not to titillate in the least.  When I say she does nothing, I mean it - if she were digitally removed from every frame of her screen time, it wouldn't impact the story at all.  In fact, the "twist" her character reveals at the end manages to come as no surprise, even though no clues were dropped.  Here's a hint: in a Hollywood crap-machine that was engineered solely to make money on proven formulas and manufactured appeal to the widest demographic possible, do you think the Hispanic woman will end up with the white guy, or the black guy?  Duh - neither, of course.

  The dialogue in this movie has to be heard to be believed.  I mean, four screenwriters (with two more given story credit) are credited in writing this - and yet, I am amazed that lines like this were written with comedy in mind.  They're so bad, it's hard to imagine anybody from this planet actually being amused by them.  They're so, so SO bad - and in so many ways.

  The lines are bad.  "No more Mr. Knife guy." "That's a breath of fresh ass."  "...and she'll cut the legs right out from under you!" To say nothing of the "drumming on the chick's tits" gag.

  The endless references to the fact that Jim West is black are just embarrassing.  Not one of these generates a laugh - this is why I said those who said nay to a black Jim West were right but for the wrong reasons.  I know, it's the writers' fault - still, to have been spared this, we'd have been better off had a Galapagos tortoise been cast in the part.  Yeah, there'd be tortoise gags galore, but they can't be as bad as Smith's "I'm from Africa, and where I come from..." speech.

  And the endless repitition of certain gags will leave you yearning for the restraint of Tim Burton showing us a martian's head exploding, and then showing another, and another and another and another, about fifty-five times.  One scene, West meets an Asian chick (Bai Ling) named East.  Yes, she actually points out the gag for us, as if we hadn't figured it out for ourselves.  A few times.  In the same scene, West comes face-to-face with Loveless, and they trade gags - Loveless not-so-subtly making racial jabs at West, West not-so-subtly making fun of Loveless's leglessness.  These keep going back and forth, back and forth, becoming increasingly obscure and impossible to imagine people actually saying, and less and less attached to actually saying anything as double entendres become excuses to just say something about being black or legless.  The worst has to be Smith's turn at dressing in drag - it's an incredibly drawn-out scene, stuck in at an outrageously inappropriate moment.  (can you imagine a villain, in the middle of outlining his nefarious plan, actually stopping to enjoy a lap dance from an unknown "woman" who arrives at this secret location unscheduled?)

  As for the plot, it's a huge mess of stupidities and contrivances, my favorite of which being when Gordon invents the airplane in about five seconds of screen time (which looks like maybe fifteen minutes of narrative time).  I'm too exhausted by writing this review to get into any more.

  But...but...even if the acting sucks, even if the gags fail, and the plot sucks, we've still got the FX and the action, right?  Right?

  Bzzt.  BIG FAILURE.  Here it is guys, bottom line.

  THIS IS THE UGLIEST MOVIE I'VE EVER SEEN.

  The hazy CGI creations in this movie are so shoddily done that they don't even look like they were shot on film.  Everything's so murky and yellowish, I felt like I was watching creamed corn projected onto the screen.  The giant mechanical tarantula never looks believable for half a second.  Compare this to the menacing, lumbering AT-AT's from The Empire Strikes Back, which is nineteen years old.  The effects in this movie are a joke - except that this movie cost, depending on who you listen to, $100M-175M.  That's an awfully expensive flop of a joke.

  There are a couple of good visual ideas, but they're all wasted - particularly one scene where hidden assassins are concealed inside paintings which ultimately turn out to be dioramas.  On so many levels - logically, photographically, in terms of editing - this scene just destroys itself.

  The action, similarly, is about on a par with a Saturday Night Live skit.  One villain (in a scene which introduces these cybernetic henchmen which were never hinted at before; where did these guys come from?) manages to kill himself accidentally by what appears to be electrocution, but whatever it was he shocked himself with is always off-screen.  If it weren't for a sound effect (which was probably added at the last moment after test screenings), we wouldn't know what made this guy drop dead at all.  There's also one scene where a halting horse sends West flying over its head, still holding the reins, which are the only thing saving him because the horse had stopped at the edge of a cliff.  Never mind that we've seen this exact stunt at least twice this decade (in True Lies and Maverick) - at least in those two movies, it was actually a cliff, or at least a skyscraper, offering peril to the hero.  The drop West saves himself from by hanging on to those reins?  It appears to be about twelve feet.  Now, you can get hurt pretty badly in a twelve-foot fall, but c'mon, I expect better than that from an action hero.

  Bad effects and action - these are things that, strangely, get better with volume (as opposed to bad laughs and acting).  So more of that awful CGI tarantula action would have been appreciated, and was certainly expected after so much ado was made of it all in the trailers.  Will Smith might have been the star of this movie, but the giant metal tarantula was easily the second draw.  Too bad it only shows up in the last act (introduced as if the audience is supposed to be surprised by it, despite it appearing in all the ads and on the posters), and not frequently enough at that.

  Wild, Wild West is a movie of excruciating badness.  It's not so-bad-it's-awesome, or so-bad-it's-good; it's just so, so bad.  It's a colossal shitbag of a movie that's easily the worst - and the worst-made - summer blockbuster movie that I can remember ever seeing.  That's saying a lot.

  Oh yeah, that one successful laugh.  This one laugh prevents me from lumping this movie in with the worst movies of all time.  Without this laugh, this would be the only megablockbuster in the pile.  As it is, it's just the worst megablockbuster I've ever seen.  This laugh is the result of an eavesdropping misunderstanding, the likes of which we saw several times on Three's Company.  It was stupid.  It was not particularly witty.  And it was delivered just like every other complete failure of an attempt at comedy in this movie.  But somehow, it squeezed a chuckle out of me.  I'm kind of ashamed of that.  I like lowbrow humor as much as the next guy, and I don't consider myself above this.  I...hell, I give up, no need for excuses.  I laughed.  Once.  And that's it.

  You might wonder why all the scantily clad women didn't divert me during their screen time - hey, who needs laughs when you have cleavage and gratuitous butt shots?  Somehow, I scarcely noticed them at all.  In a movie where Salma Hayek's bare ass can be made to look uninteresting, it takes little imagination to picture just how tiresome all of these models in saloon-girl costumes get.

  Worst movie of the year?  Worst that I've seen, at any rate.  If any good comes of this, it'll be that Smith's next summer-blockbuster vehicle hopefully won't have a title song rapped by him.  Hopefully.

  This movie is based on a 60's TV series by the same name, which I've never seen and am even less curious about now than I was before, despite cries from its fans about how little in common this movie has with it.  Director Barry Sonnenfeld's pretty-good track record gets derailed here.  As for those writers - two of them gave us the wonderful Tremors, the other two, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  Talk about too many cooks.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE W's