“What’s that?” “The script.”
Every week with Revisiting the Reviled, Sean looks at a film that was meant to appeal to geeks and failed, often miserably.
Ever have anyone tell you there’s no such thing as a sure thing? Because I don’t think the good people behind Wild Wild West were aware of that clichéd saying. Not that I can blame them. The film, released in 1999, starred Will Smith, who was riding a wave of unprecedented box office success. In 1996, he starred in Independence Day which was the biggest movie of the year. In 1997, he starred in Men in Black, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, which was the second biggest movie of the year, second only to the second-highest grossing film of all-time, Titanic. Even the 1998 R-rated political thriller Enemy of the State was the fifteenth-highest grossing film of the year. Smith couldn’t lose. Neither, for that matter, could Sonnenfeld. Sonnenfeld had just helmed two Addams Family movies, Get Shorty, and MiB was the topper. Wild Wild West would mark an innocuous pothole on the career path of one and a sinkhole for another. Wanna guess who?
After opening with an unknown character being attacked by a mysterious machine, we first see Will Smith’s Jim West making sweet, sweet love in the town’s water tower. Why he and his lady friend have decided to get nasty in the town’s water supply remains a mystery. But when General “Bloodbath” McGrath (Ted Levine), a war criminal West has been trailing, arrives, West is called into action, but after horses tear down the water tower, also for reasons unknown, leaving the naked West to stand in front some dingy soldiers. His romance partner, however, defies gravity and remains within the toppled tower. This sequence is endemic of the film as a whole – a tiny bit of thought and nothing makes sense which wouldn’t be a problem if the film were half as funny as it thinks it is.
Which brings us to the first meeting of Jim West and Artemus Gordon, played by Kevin Kline. West has trailed McGrath to a brothel where Artemus Gordon is deep undercover in full drag. After a bit of confusion, the two realize they’re both lawmen after the same suspect. But McGrath escapes amidst the bickering of the two. Since they’ve already met and we’ve established they don’t like each other, Ulysses S. Grant (also played by Kline) forces the two to work together and stop “Bloodbath” McGrath. Following a wacky and zany trip on Artemus’ train full of tricks, the duo find themselves in New Orleans for a Southern masquerade ball. There they learn that McGrath isn’t the mastermind that they’re after. Long believed dead, the bisected Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh) is alive and developing a massive mechanical spider that will destroy the United States of America.
Wild Wild West is kind of magical for the way that nothing works aside from the highly stylized opening credits. As an action movie, it fails to raise the stakes, to make the action actually mean something. Of course, the massive amounts of CGI that have aged poorly give the action all the tension of a Roadrunner cartoon. All of this wouldn’t be so bad if any of the humor within the film actually worked. As a comedy, the biggest problem with Wild Wild West is the repetition and length of gags that are dead on arrival. At one point, Artemus uses a man’s severed head as a way to project his final moments. It looks weird and might’ve been more interesting if Will Smith doesn’t spend the whole scene repeating, “That’s a man’s head.” If the line were said just once, maybe twice, there’s a remote possibility that the scene would work as intended. But the line is repeated 4 or 5 times, repeating an unfunny line for minimal effect.
The repetition of jokes is always bad enough, but what makes matters worse in Wild Wild West are the jokes that get repeated. For reasons that I can’t quite comprehend, the film finds incredible amounts of humor in transvestism, making sure that the audience gets a glimpse of both Will Smith and Kevin Kline in drag. Funny! But there’s also a number of jokes that are centered round homosexuality, whether it’s them being overheard and misunderstood by a colleague or the magnetic devices trapped around their necks being attached to belt buckle. It’s not even that these jokes are tasteless in a politically correct sensibility, it’s more that they’re just not funny. And like so many of the jokes within the film, the repetition whittles these twigs of humor into dust.
Wild Wild West remains a cinematic tragedy because Barry Sonnenfeld is such a gifted stylist, though none of the visual flair can help the film come together. It’s not hard to see why. Between story and screenplay credits there are 6 credited writers on Wild Wild West, which might explain why the film is all over the place. In its own scattershot way, the film tries to deal with the real life horrors that occurred in the time period, but it posits these moments of institutional racism in a comedic context, undermining their horrific nature. I can’t help but find a scene where Will Smith’s character is trying to smooth talk his way out of being lynched to be anything but bad taste.
Following the debacle of Wild Wild West, Barry Sonnenfeld would have trouble finding success with any movie that wasn’t a sequel to Men in Black. He appears to be the sacrificial lamb for a gargantuan film that was built upon a foundation of bad ideas. This top-heavy film was going to come crashing down no matter who was in the director’s chair. This a movie where every actor is playing the comedy relief and nobody is the straight man (in the comedic sense). Over 15 years later, the biggest legacy of Wild Wild West is a joke from a really old episode of South Park.
and in truth the South Park episode dropped BEFORE the movie came out, by two or three weeks. So even Parker and Stone were thinking Wild Wild West was going to be a hit.