Wild Wild West? More Like Mild Mild West, Amirite?

Wild Wild West wants to be Men In Black so badly. It's coming two years after those galaxy defenders showed up on multiplex screens across the world and broke tons of box office records and tried to replicate that movies financial success by reuniting the star and director of that film (Will Smith and Barry Sonnenfeld, respectively) in another heavily stylized action/comedy romp. This time, though, they were going to be working in the Western genre adapting the classic TV show Wild Wild West into a major motion picture and Smith would be paired off against Kevin Kline. The results were less akin to Men In Black and instead more along the lines of Men In Black II.

In this particular 19th century set movie, the buddy cop duo consists of two Federal agents, James T. West (Will Smith) and Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline). West is a vengeful warrior while Gordon is an eccentric inventor and they don't like each other one bit. But they're going to have to put their differences aside and work together if they hope to stop baddie Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), a former Confederate soldier who lost the bottom half of his body in the war and is now looking for vengeance. That plan for vengeance includes a mechanical spider that one of the producers of the movie had been eager to put into a motion picture for years now (the original plan was to use that mechanical spider in a Kevin Smith-penned Superman movie).

While Wild Wild West clearly wants to ape Men In Black, it makes one clear departure from that movie that pretty much kills it; it aims to be a comedy with heavy action blockbuster elements rather than the tone of Men In Black which was an action blockbuster with heavy comedic elements. Boy howdy does that turn out to be a terrible idea for Wild Wild West considering how painfully unfunny its various attempts at "gags" are, which include excruciatingly unfunny puns and an extended bit involving Will Smith waxing poetic on the virtues of slavery in order to placate some white people that have cornered him. If they were gonna make this a comedy, couldn't they make this thing remotely funny?

I guess the various screenwriters associated with this project couldn't be bothered with those kinds of small details, though maybe they were thinking the chemistry between Will Smith and Kevin Kline would be so sharp that wittiness would emanate from their rapport. If so, that was a bad idea since Smith and Kline (both talented actors individually) make for a poor duo to headline the movie. Their thinly sketched characters aren't the least bit interesting on an individual basis and pairing them together makes for shockingly inert cinema. It's hard to figure out how exactly these two characters benefit from each other by working together and a climax that has them going off entirely seperate
missions just manages to reinforce how badly done this central pairing is.

Salma Hayek and M. Emmet Walsh get wasted in supporting turns, with the only actor that works being Kenneth Branagh. He's doing the most over-the-top schtick out of anyone but the fact that he's got a cogent agency to him and actually does exude a sense of menace makes him by far the best character in the movie. To boot, his mechanical spider is rendered with solid visual effects work, I wouldn't be shocked to learn if the majority of the $175 million budget (man, how did anyone think they were gonna make all that money back??) was spent on that big climactic creature. The production design is overall decent though I wish the look and style of the various inventions by Artemus Gordon had way more distinctiveness to them and there's some green-screen work that's bad even by the standards of 1999. The costume work also lacks its own sense of identity, the various pieces of attire adorned by the characters feels like it could have been ripped from any other Western movie.

Some cool visual touches and Branagh's performance really is, alas, all Wild Wild West has to offer in the way of positive elements. To be fair, that does make better than then-future Will Smith starring vehicles Hancock, After Earth and Suicide Squad, but that's not really the praise the people behind this incredibly poorly made movie wanted to hear when they green-lit it. You chalk up a lot of this to an abysmal script that's chock full of painfully bad humor and a lame sense of structure, but it's also the underutilized supporting cast, the dismally executed action sequences, the lack of fun, the...let's just say lots of stuff goes off the railroad tracks in Wild Wild West.