Mild, Mild "West" by Homer Yen (c) 1999
If you haven't plunked down your hard-earned money yet for "Wild Wild West," the latest summer holiday offering from Will Smith, let me say right now that your money will be better spent on a Starbuck's Frappacino or on a Ben & Jerry's Sundae. These treats are great relief from the summer heat. In contrast, this film made me simmer in disappointment.
I can accept the fact that summer movies tend to put more weight into special effects and that good stories and flavorful characters usually take a back seat. This was true of Star Wars Episode I, but at least in that film, the story and the characters were still in the back seat. In this film, they are no where to be found. What remains are hundreds of male extras costumed as gunslingers and foppish aristocrats, lots of female extras who look like Can-Can dancers, and a clunky, 80-foot tall instrument of destruction that resembles a mechanical tarantula.
Two men are asked to stop this threat. One is Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline), an inventor who uses his intellect and array of disguises to best his opponents. Among his creations are false breasts and the bulletproof vest. The other man is Jim West (Will Smith), who prefers the shoot-first-then-shoot-some-more method of investigating. Although their individual talents must be combined to achieve success, their interaction with one another merely seemed like a second rate, two-man Vaudevillian act. For example, there is a scene where West, being more debonair than the reserved Gordon, notes that the fake breasts should be filled with water rather than buckwheat, which is what it is currently filled with. "Now touch my breast," West says. Gordon does so and then softly coos his approval. I found myself groaning at this kind of silliness. The script fails to generate any sense of drama, humor, or fun for that matter.
I did enjoy Kline's reserved performance, but was surprised at how much latitude they gave to Smith. Could it be that Will Smith is just so bankable that he's not even required to act? It was as if the director was yelling "Will Smith, do your own thing...AND ACTION!" Here's an example. In this scene, Will Smith is about to be hanged by a group of angry white people. He must endear himself to the crowd to escape. The director yells, "Will Smith, do your own thing...AND ACTION!" In another scene, he has to masquerade as a belly dancer in order to save his comrades. "Will Smith, do your own thing...AND ACTION!"
Worse still, the final battle scene aboard the mechanical tarantula is a horrid mess. There are cogs spinning and pulleys pulling and levers going up and down everywhere you look. There's actually a lot of imagination at work in this film. There are some genuinely clever inventions and gizmos introduced, but all of this imagination is wasted in a film that is visually cluttered and dramatically flat. And that's too bad because if there was more focus on the story rather than Will Smith just doing his 'thing,' this film might have been palatable. As it turns out, "Wild Wild West" is the wild, wild worst and receives my vote for biggest disappointment of the year.
Grade: C-
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