Movie Review: "Wild Wild West" (1999)

As a long-time fan of the show, I was horribly, horribly disappointed by this movie when it came out (so much so that I never even blogged about it).  With the distance of time, and a chance to watch it with my daughter tonight, I have a slightly better appreciation for it, along with a sense of where it went so wrong.

On the Plus Side

– Will Smith does a decently dramatic turn as James West, alongside his trademark portrayal of Will Smith.  It became too much the latter than the former on a few too many occasions, but I thought he did a decent job.

– Kevin Kline is wonderful as Artemus Gordon. Ross Martin would have been pleased.

– The two do quite well together as rivals and eventual … well, if not friends, then comrades in arms.

– I really didn't mind all the steampunky bits, nor even the villainous character name silliness.  It was quite in keeping with both the TV series and its inspiration, the Bond films.

– The one positive element to Kenneth Brannagh's role as Dr. Arliss Loveless is the banter between him and West. It's hard to make racial puns work, but when they're countered with cripple puns, it's just shocking enough to succeed.

On the Minus Side

– Elmer Bernstein could always whip up a good score, but they clearly had (since they included it in one scene) rights to the original TV music, and losing that from the get-go was a sign that things were headed the wrong direction.

– Okay, enough with the sex jokes already. Especially the rather clumsy cross-dressing and homoerotic jokes between West and Gordon. They simply brought everything else in the movie to a screeching halt.  There's banter, and then there's burlesque.

– Salma Hayek is not only wasted, she actually detracts from the story.

– While sadly Michael Dunn is dead, the replacement of Miguelito Loveless with Brannagh's Arliss Loveless fails on any number of levels. Any subtlety to the villainy of Miguelito — his heritage, his struggle against the world, his appreciation for beauty, his frustrated genius — is lost in the scenery-chewing over-the-topness of Arliss, who's simply an evil mad scientist and war criminal.

– Granted that the sophistication of the script and characters was not significantly worse than a 1960s TV show, one expects a bit better in a feature movie in 1999. Instead, the whole thing is a structural mess, as if it went through way too many rewrites to maintain any narrative integrity.  And aside from the stars (and even there we have problems), everyone else is a cardboard cut-out, their lives and deaths meaningless.

In summary, it's not easy to reboot an old, beloved TV series into a movie. Slavish adoption isn't necessary, but any changes you make should be clever, and, net-net, an improvement upon the original. You need enough homages to the best of the old show while giving people a reason to enjoy the new movie in its own right. Charlie's Angels was a great example of how to do it correctly.  _Wild Wild West_ is, sadly, a counter-example, showing how to do it poorly.

Embedded Link

Wild Wild West (1999)
The two best hired guns in the West must save President Grant from the clutches of a 19th century inventor-villain.

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