If you don't think Kevin Kline in drag is funny, wait 'til you see Will Smith in drag--it's even less funny. By the time Jim West (Smith) had disguised himself as a belly dancer to retrieve his captured comrade Artemus Gordon (Kline) from the clutches of evil Dr. Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), I was unequivocally bored with Wild Wild West, the new summer action-comedy from Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld. Is the Old West really a breeding ground for high camp, anyway? (If your answer is no, then you recall Rustler's Rhapsody or Back to the Future Part III; if your answer is yes, you're thinking of Blazing Saddles, but Blazing Saddles was a parody of the western genre that also satirized the social climate of 1974, not a nineteenth-century romp.)

1869. Jim West is a quick-draw lawman who, under orders from President Grant (Kline again, whose impression, for all we know, is dead-on), teams up with brainiac federal agent Gordon to apprehend the legless Loveless, the mad inventor plotting to divvy up the United States and sell it back to Britain and Spain. How will Loveless accomplish this? Well, by hulking around the desert in an enormous, mechanical tarantula, of course.

Bosomy dance hall girl Rita Escobar (Hayek), whose scientist father was kidnapped by Loveless, joins West and Gordon on their gadget-filled train. (Gordon first discovers Rita in a cage, waiting to be rescued.) Racial politics apparently prevented the filmmakers from pairing dull Rita romantically with West, despite the movie's 'hip' attitude toward the black thang. (West automatically shoots anyone who calls him a "nigger" before that person can finish speaking the word. Progress?) In any event, I kept waiting for Rita to say something humourous, but she's a walking dress-up toy. Her single comic moment is also the best shot of the film: she bashfully reveals bare buns through the peek-a-boo flap of her jammies.

Jim West is the role that finally stymied Will Smith. The actor's comic timing has always been hit or miss, as a sampling of episodes of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" will attest. Smith's a better reactor than an actor, which is why he was so thoroughly engaging in Men in Black--he didn't start out a hero. In Wild Wild West he's required to exude Eastwood cool and amuse at the same time (and from frame one), a difficult feat I'm not sure any living performer could pull off. Smith is ill-equipped, for example, to handle the moment in which Jim West performs stand-up for some rednecks at his own hanging.

What attracted Sonnenfeld to this material? This isn't the first time he has adapted a TV show for the big screen (remember The Addams Family), but it's the first unqualified stinker of his career as a director. Wild Wild West is poorly-paced bombast, full of DOA gags (Ted Levine shows up as a general using a gramophone horn for a hearing aid; Levine, The Silence of the Lambs' Buffalo Bill, is too intense to get an intentional laugh), lousy special effects (the bluescreening is amateurish--foregrounds are never proportionate to the backgrounds), and frequent illogic. To wit, its ridiculous villain so badly wants Jim West out of the way that he...drops him onto a steel platform to do battle with some generic, ugly henchmen instead of shooting him at point-blank range with one of the many guns on board the tarantula.

Wild Wild West's bright spots, such as the cool opening credits sequence, Bai Ling's all-too-brief appearance as a femme fatale, or the brilliant "His Master's Voice" joke, are all part of the film's first half, which is more clever and enjoyable, at least, than its second. When, towards what seemed like the end of Wild Wild West, Gordon proposed the idea of building an airplane and West rejected it, there was a collective groan among audience members: it meant we were going to have to sit through another loud action sequence before Gordon builds the glider, the invention of which would inevitably lead to the proverbial whiz-bang finale.-Bill Chambers

Published: July, 1999