Heading back to the release of 1999, let’s look at another Western—one that was part of that 90s trend to adapt every random US TV show from the sixties. A couple of them worked and laid the foundation for movie franchises of their own, like Mission Impossible. Some were absolute dreck that leave your brain dissolving into cheese, like the 1998 Avengers film (nothing to do with Marvel, sorry!). And some, like this one, just left people scratching their head somewhat. Will Smith has made perhaps worse decisions in the 25 years since, but for a time, many people did question what he was doing in Wild Wild West.
Having otherwise very little to do with that TV show, what this amounted to was an attempt to recapture the spirit of Men in Black—down to the same director with Barry Sonnenfeld, and of course Will himself. And yet, something was missing—Kevin Kline is certainly trying his best as Smith’s co-star, but the deadpan humor from MIB was replaced with…jokes about Salma Hayek’s backside. Some people lay the blame at producer Jon Peters, who saw constant script changes and shoehorning of oddities like—if Kevin Smith is to believed—his seeming fetish for giant spiders. Despite that, is there anything to enjoy here?
Honestly, I will say that there are some fun enough elements—like the score from Elmer Bernstein, which is having the time of its life combining classic western-style orchestral scores with funkier spy elements, fitting the tone. Will Smith, at the top of his career back in the nineties, is doing all he can to inject the cool his young self so naturally possessed into the proceedings—wherein he plays a US secret agent in the post Civil War years, tracking down rogue Confederate officers connected to a certain wheelchair-bound mad scientist played by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh is also…something to watch, for he decided that subtlety is a mere suggestion, and to his credit is also trying to have fun putting on a Southern accent trying to make Gary Oldman in the Fifth Element look like the acme of restraint.
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| Is he reacting to the script, or whatever style of hipster beard that's meant to be? You decide! |
But, well, it’s all the stuff in between that kinda falters. The script just keeps landing short of genuinely funny jokes—and there’s a couple moments where Will and Branagh’s characters meet to, er, exchange quips about one another’s ethnicity and disability respectively. Even back in ’99 this raised a couple eyebrows, and there’s no satire or anything that makes it go together. There’s another uncomfortable moment where Will tries to talk himself out a lynching, and it feels like he was just made to improv with not much coming out of it.
I think the real killer is the chemistry between him and Kline. Kline’s fine by himself here, so to speak, but the characters just seem to despise each other until it’s time for them not to. There’s none of the charisma and smooth talking Tommy Lee Jones had in Men in Black to complement Smith, just…this sense that neither character kinda wants to be together, so why should the audience?
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| After 34776 takes trying to get something amusing here, you'd look the same. |
Still, again, there are moments of enjoyability—like that iconic 80-foot steampunk mechanical spider unveiled at the end, which I’ll admit still looks pretty cool. At this act we finally get what the film needed—Kline and Smith working together, all the actors playing things up to their full ridiculous extent, and stuff blowing up. For the most part, the production design certainly was trying, with all manner of rather intricately designed nutty 19th-century gadgetry. And then there's the rap song, because Will did one for MIB, so they had to do one here too. It's...so stupid it actually goes around to being kinda fun!
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| See, they didn't have THIS in Spiderverse! |
Of course after that we have a squib of an ending that feels like it was shoehorned in regarding Selma Hayek’s character (she’s a thing, but it’s easy to forget in between all the steampunk madness and bad jokes about fake breasts or whatever). That’s kinda Wild Wild West in a nutshell—it’s not the worst film in this era, but it’s this odd mixed bag that ranges from amusing to ‘just what the hell am I watching’?
Still, I’d take it over After Earth any day. And while Smith at the time lamented somewhat choosing this over the Matrix…hey, at least it was a better choice than certain slapping shenanigans, I think it’s fair to say, right?
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