At the Movies

Wild, Wild West Isn't Wild And Isn't Much Fun Either

David Chute
Mirror Contributing Writer

The legendary B-movie mogul Roger Corman, commenting on the extravagant plans of a rival producer, is supposed to have declared: "He might as well take his money, pile it up in the middle of the street, and set fire to it." Warner Brothers has a merry little blaze going in theaters showing the latest retro-TV adaptation, "Wild Wild West." Actually, it's quite a big blaze. The plume of smoke is probably visible in Tokyo.
   If the movie feels like a shameful waste of resources, though, this is not just because it is frivolous or silly, or even because it's incinerating money by the truckload. There are worse things to waste money on than silly movies. Unless we were born yesterday we go to pictures like this one expecting little more than a few laughs and a couple of inventive SFX routines—the scifi equivalent of the dance sequences in musicals. This picture is shameful not because it cost so much but because despite its cost it's hardly ever any fun.
   "Wild Wild West" is supposed to have been drastically reedited at the eleventh hour, but if that's the case, how do we account for the material they left in? There's a long dull sequence in the middle of Will Smith and Kevin Kline, as frontier secret agents James West and Artimus Gordon, trudging along in front of a back-projected desert sandscape, wearing huge metal Walter Raleigh collars, that seems to be included mostly to kill time. It has no other function that I can discern. And the giant spiderboat featured in the trailers, piloted by the truncated supermeanie Dr. Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), turns out to be ugly-and ungainly and way too slow moving to be really scary. It may have looked cool on paper, but on the screen it's just an overgrown Tinkertoy contraption galumphing among the mesas, kicking up clouds of dust.
   Smith and Kline, working hard for their money, upon occasion almost manage to convince us that we're having fun. Kline gets to dress in drag and play tricks with elaborate gadgets, and he seems to have adapted some of the florid mannerisms of a stage magician, pulling high tech bunnies out of a series of silly hats. And Will Smith, over the course of his last few movies, has become quite a dashing leading man, buoyant and good-humored. His handsomeness is in a sense redeemed by the famous batwing ears, which add a hint of goofiness and make him more accessible.
   Like a lot of stars now, Smith is frequently obliged to get by on charm alone, because he's given nothing else to play. But his appeal is more layered than most, so the sense of disappointment is more acute. Smith often portrays guys who act as cool as cucumbers and pretend to be right on top of every situation, but aren't really fooling anybody. He's bluffing his way through life, and knows that we're onto him, but he enjoys the joke so much that he can't resist sharing it with us.
   The combination of suave huckersterism and vulnerability has become his stock in trade as a superstar, but it was put to better use in his first major movie role, as a gay con artist passing himself off as the son of Sidney Poitier in Fred Schepsi's "Six Degrees of Separation." Smith fought to be cast in that film in 1993, and he was right to do so: it was perfect for him and he was very good in it. He shouldn't have to push himself that hard every time, but there must be star vehicles available that would allow him to be more interesting. (Several of the shaky hustler roles that Tom Cruise has scored in, like the ones in "Rainman" and Jerry McGuire," would have been right up Smith's alley.) In other words, money isn't the only thing that gets squandered in these big fat empty movies. Smith is still a long way from wearing out his welcome, but he's been left high and dry in almost every scene here, vamping desperately, like the hard working host at a dull costume party struggling to keep everybody's spirits up. It is not a pretty sight.
   My own spirits would have benefited from a few more shots of the resident vamp, Salma Hayek, in her frilly skivvies. According to reports, several of Salma's saucier scenes were left to rot on the cutting floor—proof positive that the men behind "Wild Wild West" ("Men in Black" director Barry Sonnenfeld et al) have forgotten pretty much everything they ever knew about showing the audience a good time. This is not a mistake that Roger Corman would have made.