Review: Wild, Wild West

Despite the dismal record of old-TV-series-made-into-FX-extravaganzas, I forced myself not to prejudge this latest entrant. The trailer seemed halfway interesting, and it had Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh. How bad could it be?

Don't ask! If you want to see The Fresh Prince of the Old West, then by all means blow your hard-earned cash on it. Otherwise, you'll be wasting your time.

The first major element missing from Wild, Wild West is a plot. Oh, it has a story, but that seems to be there mainly to give everybody an opportunity to throw out as many zingers and one-liners per minute as possible. Kenneth Branagh, only half a man for this picture, is going to take over the world with a gigantic robotic spider. That's it, and you know exactly what's going to happen fifteen minutes into the film. So much for suspense.

As for the humor, it ranges from frat house scatology to third-grade gross-out, liberally spiced with potty jokes. There are about five really funny moments in the entire two hours, and one wonders whether they are actually in John Thomas's script or ad libs thrown in by the actors out of sheer desperation. The sight gags are as lame as the verbal ones - like giving Will Smith a black horse and Kevin Kline a white one as they ride off to save the President of the United States. And there's Kenneth Branagh's villain, Dr. Loveless, who doesn't exist from the waist down. Dr. Love-less, get it? Tee-hee.

The production values are as manic-depressive as the script. There are scenes with excellent attention to detail, such as the wonderful punched-tin ceiling in a bordello and the sheep "mowing" the White House lawn. Ted Levine's make-up and costuming as General "Bloodbath" McGrath made me want to run home for a long, hot shower. Unfortunately, there are also scenes where the rear projection is so obvious one loses all sense of involvement.

Salma Hayek is in this movie, too, although apparently only so that Smith and Kline (no, not the investment firm) have someone to make sophomoric sexual innuendos about. It's obvious at an early point that her presence is entirely gratuitous - somebody suddenly realized they were halfway through the script and hadn't put in a gorgeous woman. Enter Salma.

Given what they had to work with, the cast did the best that they could. As mentioned earlier, Smith eventually just fell back into playing the Fresh Prince, emerging once or twice to give the kind of performance he's capable of. There is a scene in which he and Branagh exchange a barrage of double-entendre insults that is exquisite in it's rapid-fire timing. In another, the irrepressible Kline does a right-on-the-mad-scientist harangue that is a cross between Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein and George Carlin talking about STUFF!

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