Wild Wild West (1999)

Just another example of Hollywood excess gone for naught. This film is so bad that anyone who pays to see it should have their head examined. I'm sorry but sometimes hollywood execs should spend 100 million dollars on five smaller movies than one extravagent piece of garbage.

Kevin Kline, who is one of my favorite actors, did not seem to care in this film. Did he just phone it in? As for the rest of the acting, well, Mr. Kline was the best.

There were so many problems with the film I cannot even list them here. The first of many was that the plot just never interested you. Then, the special effects didn't work either.

Oh well, I'm sure Will Smith will make a comeback and this will not effect his bankability.

Fmovies: I had read something on Internet Movie Data Base saying that WWW was "not as bad as the reviews" ..... well, all through the movie, I kept waiting for it to get "not as bad as the reviews" and I never found it ..... it is one of the few movies I felt like leaving, and felt like the price of admission during a matinee was too much .....

For me.... I just cannot suspend disbelief to the point of seeing stuff that is impossible to be built today with todays technologies being built like they were nothing in 1869 ..... it is like throwing out every law of physics and science ..... but then pasting a few things in to try and make it look real .....

There was just so many impossible things done in that movie that are just impossible ... I like Science-fiction .... heck, I like fantasy movies.... You can invent all kinds of unrealistic stuff and I'll suspend disbelief forever... and like the made up stuff and enjoy the movie .....

But this was absurd, and they tried to pass it off as feasible .... (which is my only real problem with the movie) ......

For the record, I am a Will Smith fan, and I liked Men In Black (some connection with MiB and WWW) ...... but in MiB, the technologies came from elsewhere (and were just as ridiculous) .... but I can buy it ..... unlike this movie trying to pass of things that are totally ludicrous.

1 out of 10

Wow. I'd heard so many awful things about this movie. One ugly remark came rolling after another until the point that it'd pretty much taken its toll on me and I was sure I'd end up liking the movie just on the pure basis of the belief that it couldn't be that bad. It is that bad, and deserves every bit of the harsh criticism poured upon it. Wild Wild West is easily tied for the worst summer blockbuster I've seen in, well, possibly forever (the other one would be Tomb Raider). But at least it's still a smidgen better than Patch Adams.

What's the story? Will Smith and Kevin Kline (who have zero comic chemistry)(actually more like somewhere in the negatives, since they actually suck the fun out of the action) are secret service agents in the 1870's, trying to protect Ulysses S. Grant from a madman named Dr. Loveless (Kenneth Branagh, embarrassing himself to colossal extents). What we get is one of the most awfully unfunny movies in existence. As a matter of fact, what kept in my seat was wondering if the jokes could possibly get worse. And yes, they do. On a morbid level, there's some fascination to be had with what director Barry Sonnenfeld believes is good humor. The action's too sparse to ever be thrilling, the editing is incompetent (anybody else wonder how that one "indestructible" henchman suddenly met his demise at the end?), and the special effects MIGHT satisfy little kids. If you actually watch this movie in a crowd, it's the kind that induces blushes on whoever suggested watching this movie in the first place.

Wild Wild West fmovies. Buried in this god-awful disaster of a movie is a germ of an inkling of an iota of a great idea. It is not the idea of making a big blockbuster out of the great old 1960s TV show "The Wild Wild West," an idea which can, at best, be described as tiresomely uninspired. Nor is there brilliance in transforming the image of the lead character just so that they could build the role around star-of-the-moment Will Smith. But out of that horribly perverse example of Hollywood commercial packaging there is an intriguing premise, which naturally seems to have slipped past all involved without a second glance. What if the best, brightest and most intrepid government agent working in post-Civil War America was, indeed, a black man? Realistically, how would an African-American, functioning in a repressive, racist society, where even the most liberal thinker would see him as a second-class citizen, indeed, a second class human being, be able to not only outsmart the bad guys, but to impress even the skeptical good guys? It is an intriguing idea because, on the one hand, such an agent would not be suspected of being a threat and, on the other hand, he would have to overcome so many more barriers than a white man would ever face. He would be both invisible and yet stand out like the proverbial sore thumb just about anywhere he went. He'd be constantly fighting two battles. Such a film could be thrilling and funny, yet something rare: original.

"The Wild Wild West" TV show itself was all those things: it was highly derivative of both the traditional western and the then-fresh James Bond-style spy movie -- with more than a little bit of Batman-style comic book campiness kicked in -- yet it was ingenious in the way it melded those mythic genres into a one-of-a-kind series. There was never anything quite like "The Wild Wild West" and never anything since -- including this disastrous 1997 movie.

Everything about WILD WILD WEST, the movie, is just plain bad: tacky special effects; clumsy direction; an embarrassing screenplay; plus a fine, bewildered cast wasted in totally unworkable roles. But as bad as everything else is, the base rot of WWW goes directly to its reworked premise. No matter how open minded one might be, or how much one prides oneself on being socially color blind, there is just no way to honestly accept replacing Robert Conrad, TV's James West, with Will Smith. The time and the place dictate that James West be a white male -- unless, the filmmakers acknowledge and embrace the incongruity and use it for a real purpose.

Yet, the filmmakers want it both ways: the audience is expected to be able to ignore Smith's skin color, while at the same time the entire plot is based on his confrontation with a white racist trying to reestablish Confederate power and seize control of the U.S. government. How can you respect or believe in a film or filmmakers that get all preachy about the evils of racism while all along dealing with the issue with absolutely no respect for historical honesty? It is not clear if having Smith play James West as a cocky, street smart, John Shaft-style character was intended to be a joke, social commentary or just absurd politically correct pandering to black audiences, but it is clear that it does not work. The most outrageously unbelievable thing about WILD WILD WEST is not the wildly improbable sci-fi inventions but that the Smith character actually makes it to the end of the film without being lynched. It's not that the anachronism of a cocksure 20th

So much potential and ALL of it wasted!

We have:

1) A good director, Barry Sonnenfeld, with two great comedies to his name ("The Addams Family" and "Addams Family Values");

2) An Oscar-winning actor, Kevin Kline, well-known for his comedic work ("A Fish Called Wanda", "Soapdish") as well as dramatic ("Sophie's Choice", "The Ice Storm");

3) Another Oscar nominee, Kenneth Branagh ("Hamlet", "Henry V"), famous for directing, as well as writing and acting

AND THIS IS THE BEST THEY COULD DO !?!?!?! What gives?

First and foremost, it should be noted that just because Will Smith is popular, that doesn't mean he's good. There's something about him when he acts that makes him appear as more of a "ham" than an actor, a scene-stealer who's insecure with being the star of a film so he overacts to conceal (albeit unsuccessfully) the limitations of his acting abilities.

And for Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh to play second fiddle to HIM? Absolutely criminal. What's next? Jack Nicholson playing a supporting role to Pauly Shore?

Then there's the storyline - are we really supposed to believe that James West (as played by Smith, a black man) is a hero of the Civil War? Of course, the casting of Smith serves primarily as a set-up for all the racial humor (which gets old fast). Logically, though, it's an asinine premise, a fact which audiences obviously picked up on given the tepid reaction to Smith's so-called "star power" in this weak take-off on a really good television series.

Who's responsible for this mess? Maybe it's the fault of all the writers (a total of 6) for writing it, or Sonnenfeld's mess for directing it, or Jon Peters' (and Sonnenfeld's) mess for producing it, or Warner Bros.' mess for distributing it? Whose ever it is, it should just be shelved and forgotten as an embarrassing mistake.

Back in the 60s, The Wild, Wild West, staring Robert Conrad and Russ Martin was one of the best shows of it's time, a interesting mixture of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Gadget Spy films, and light hearted satire. A favorite of mine, I've long enjoyed the show. So naturally, I was looking forward to the big screen adaption, even though it did star Will Smith (Sorry, Will, but you're no Robert Conrad.)

The movie had all the ingredients needed to make a good film: An excellent cast (Kevin Klein, Ken Branaugh, Selma Hayek, even Smith,) an excellent, proven director in Barry Sonnefeld, and a proven genre... Rather, it had all the ingredients that it needed except one... It had the worst script possible.

I've always been wary of any project that was written by committee, and this film is one project that proves why. The excellent cast, crew, and effects of this film were wasted on one of the worst screenplays I've ever seen. The clever (if pulp inspired) stories of the original series are replaced by tepid attempts at comedy which even Smith, who normally is very funny, can't pull off. Kenneth Branaugh succeeds at nothing other than managing to eat the scenery, unable to do anything else, since his lines are so bad. Klein is saddled with the role of Smith's straight man, something that he's just too damn funny to be. As for the effects, like I said, they were spectacular, but the problem is that they seem to be the 'be all and end all' of the movie, instead of working for the story (such as there was in this case.) The simple fact is that they overpower the film.

I guess, if you are a die hard Will Smith fan who has never seen the original series, you might like this one. But for fans of the old series, avoid it, and watch reruns, or else one of the two other shows in the genre, 'Legend' or 'The Adventures of Brisco County Junior.'