Back to the 90s: Wild Wild West (Dir Barry Sonnenfeld, 1h46m, 1999)

There are...certain films whose notoriety precede them; 1963's Cleopatra in which Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton star in a clunking, if almost insanely lavish adaption of Anthony and Cleopatra that never made its colossal budget back in cinemas, but brought Taylor and Burton together to marry and divorce twice. 1956's The Conqueror, in which John Wayne, as Genghis Khan leads a cast in an historical epic produced by a increasingly neurotic Howard Hughes, essentially kills its cast over the next quarter of a century, as the exterior shots in Utah were a mere hundred miles from land that the US Army had spent half a decade carrying out atom bomb tests on. The 1984 adaption of Dune. Heaven's Gate. Jaws: The Revenge. Hell, two of the most notorious films of the 1990s have already been discussed here, being Waterworld and Batman & Robin, neither of which truly deserve their infamy so much as they're outriders to rapidly changing trends in cinema.

Lurking at the end of the 90s though, is one of the worst films ever made, a film so bad the star of the 60s TV Series it adapted turned up to collect three Golden Raspberrys (a long-running joke plaudit given to truly terrible movies), so bad it seismicly changed the career of one of the greatest actors of the 90s, and would destroy that of its director. A film so notorious, so brimming with a complete lack of basic cinematic principles, with a complete lack of charm, or of narrative, that I could find no better place to place this epitome of bad movie making, this echelon of the 90s action movie dying on its feet, than as my 300th review for this column. That film, of course, is 1999's Wild Wild West. Saddle up, part'ner. It's gonna be a long ride. Cue the Neil Cicierega.

By the 90s, generational nostalgia was reaching the mid 60s; 1993's Dazed and Confused would reignite the period in the cinematic imagination, but Gen X's nostalgia went further. More correctly, their nostalgia for the 60s focused on sitcoms, action-adventure series or even animated series, of their childhoods; look no further than 1991's The Addams Family, which harks back to the 1960s series, 1996's Mission Impossible, 1993's The Fugitive, or even 1993's The Beverley Hillbillies or 1994's The Flintstones. Christ, we even got Flipper. The problem is that by the millennium-end of the 1990s, studios were, on the whole, beginning to lose the plot with these expensive exercises nostalgic spelunking. Moreover, nostalgia, that fickle mistress, had moved onto the 1970s to begin the process all over again.

The two heralds of just how bad things were going to get came within months of each other in 1998; first, the overly slick and plastic-peopled Lost in Space thudded into cinema with all the impact of a pancake, aside from its electro-rock soundtrack and Gary Oldman chewing scenery with great gusto. August '98 brought, with all the grace of Sean Connery dressed in a teddy bear costume, The Avengers, in which the beloved cult British series was summarily dumbed down, and gutted for the popcorn masses. That these are only two of the four horsemen of the summer of remakes (the others being Godzilla and the still bizarre from top to bottom remake of Psycho) only further highlights how badly this trend in Hollywood was starting to run on fumes.

Enter, thus, The Wild Wild West. Beginning in 1965, and marrying the declining Western genre to its upstart usurper, the spy/espionage adventure, through the figures of James West (Robert Conrad) and Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin), The Wild Wild West depicted the adventures of two Secret Service agents in protecting the president, and foiling complex, often diabolical plans to take over the USA from fiendish villains. It's...a charming time capsule of the mid 60s, a melting pot of nascent paranormal and occult concepts, good old Bond-esque spy gadgets, home-on-the-range (or rather, West and Gordon's Secret Service train) cowboy spills, and Jules Verne-esque steampunk, topped by excellent performances, death-defying (and often carried out by the actors) stunts, and undeniable charm. With memorable villains, daring heroes, spectacular gadgets, and a post Civil War setting that had Confederates as its recurring villains, so the series seemed prime for the 90s.

And indeed, that's what happened-1992 sees Warner Bros attach the great Richard Donner to direct an adaption scripted by Shane Black to star Mel Gibson as West-not that tall an order, as Donner had cut his teeth directing three of the original show's episodes, alongside The Twilight Zone and The Man From Uncle. Donner and Gibsons split, however, to go make a cinematic adaption of yet another 1960s tv series, Maverick (1994), which makes nearly $200 million at the box office and gains decent critical plaudits. Tom Cruise is then attached, but also leaves the project to make-yup-another tv-to-cinema adaption in 1996's Mission Impossible. Enter, thus, in February 1997, Barry Sonnenfeld as director, and Will Smith as Jim West

Will Smith by this point needs little introduction-no man epitomises the 90s like Will Smith, from starting the decade as a phenomenally successful hip hop musician, to the star of the decade's most enduring sit-com, to becoming, frankly the biggest actor in the world for a few short years. Whilst Independence Day may have made Will a superstar, it's Men In Black, in which Smith's Agent J becomes a member of the titular clandestine organisation, that cements it; and starts his solo music career off with a suitable bang with the title theme. Sonnefield, of course, directed MiB, and by this point had already made both Addams Family movies, the critically acclaimed Get Shorty, and acted as cinematographer for the Coens and Rob Reiner.

Casting Gordon was an altogether more difficult process. Against Kevin Kline, who would eventually play the role, was Johnny Depp, Matthew McConaughey, and George Clooney, who would be attached, and then drop out of the picture mere months before shooting was to begin, owing to a blazing argument with Sonnensfeld. Klein accepts the role, and that of President Grant (in just one of two modern appearances for the President in cinema, the other being in the godawful Jonah Hex (2010)). Against them is Kenneth Branagh, playing Loveless-originally a dwarf in the TV series, played by the American actor, Michael Dunn, Branagh's version, renamed Arliss Loveless, is a vicious technocratic ex-Confederate, left badly injured and wheelchair bound after an accident during the Civil War, and bent on revenge against the north. This trio are pretty much the only characters in the film, and it's here that we need to talk, briefly, before we surrender unto the abyss that is Wild Wild West, about how this film does character

It doesn't. Will Smith is, as ever, playing himself-he's the quipping, quick thinking, utterly charming, all-action, all-wholesome hero, and he completely bowdlerises West's character, his friendship and partnership with Gordon, and any character development (there isn't any) in search of a cheap hyuk. It's even more bizarre, because arguably two of Smith's best acting performances, in Enemy of the State (1998) and Ali (2001). This isn't Will going through a dry patch as an actor, this is peak, prime Will Smith, and it's painful watching him try to make the four-hander script (written by the team behind, individually, Tremors, Whom Framed Roger Rabbit, and Short Circuit) work.
Kline is no better-whilst at least Gordon sticks closer to his original characterisation in the show, this is at the expense of any charm, and the film spends much of its runtime having West and Gordon bicker, Gordon lust after Salma Hayek's one-dimensional young lady trying to rescue her father, or bellowing utterly ridiculous lines like "I'm the master of the mechanical stuff!" at a half-yelp. We'll get to the all-you-can-eat buffet of ham and scenery Branagh tucks into at regular intervals shortly.

The film does, at least, start with...a man being decapitated by a flying saw after running for his life, yelling about giant spiders. The film...has a thing for giant spiders. It also has one for grotesques, as we're introduced, far too close to the camera, Confederate soldier and Loveless's right hand man, Bloodbath McGrath (American character actor, Ted Levine), one of a veritable cavalcade of deformed, weird, or, in perhaps the film's most dated aspect, disabled villains. McGrath, ear-trumpet et al, tugs the saw out and, in the classic sepia style, we get a fitting recreation of the opening titles of the series, our heroes and villain introduced in silhouette, and a sense of the feel of the film comes across. It is, unfortunately, fleeting (as is Elmer Bernstein's score). For no sooner have we been given a glimpse of something familiar, than it is whisked away, and we are, instead with Jim West, staking out McGrath and his men, hidden in a watertower in the company of a lady friend, and Artemus Gordon, disguised as a woman, trying to capture McGrath.

This single, bizarrely paced, breath-takingly unfunny sequence, as the duo slowly make their way to each other's scenes; Smith tracking McGrath down via his men, who are busy transferring munitions to McGrath's shadowy backer, Loveless, whilst Gordon takes the more direct route-to the man's heart, via hypnotic girdle, epitomises the rest of the film. The action is bad-Smith's charge to the saloon aside, the fights in this opening sequence feel like a Hollywood stunt show, and it ends with a pitifully scaled explosion-and both actors are more interested in leaning into their particular brands of rather lightweight comedy.

Smith fires off what he thinks are sharp quips which more often are blunt on impact, or else dissolves into self-referential anachronistic talk or baffling non-seqiteurs, especially later into the film. Klin'es one joke is that he is a brilliant, and often visionary scientist, called upon to do largely denigrating things like dress up as a woman and hit on grizzled old confederates. This isn't entirely fair-Kline's other joke is that he and West are completely incompatible and thus Kline must scream at his cowboy-headed compadre for most of the film. It's all desperately unfunny and comes with an unpleasant undercurrent of jokes at the expense of women, who the film can barely write at the best of times, and the disabled, who represent our defacto villains. We'll come back to it later, but the humour of Wild Wild West is undeniably what killed the film, and what leaves it floundering even this early into proceedings.

Moreover, it's...simply not very funny in a very peculiar and not-oft mentioned way-at least with its companions, Lost in Space and The Avengers, the humour is tangible-neither film's stiff British upper lip or zany space stuff are very funny, but at least they're outwardly trying to be funny. Wild Wild West, on the other hand, despite featuring what at that time was one of the funniest actors in cinema, is oddly straight-laced-this is a film that takes Will Smith and Kevin Kline crossdressing, a completely fucking insane plan about dividing the USA up among Europe, represented by the most stereotypical generals even, and a giant fucking mechanical fucking spider. The problem is that this seriousness isn't itself funny-it's dry, but never has anything remotely to push against it for much of the film's runtime. Nor does the film fall into what actually may have helped it, being self-referential or absurdist humour, nor the deadpan humour of Men in Black, nor the charmingly earnest odd-ball humour of The Addams Family.

One failed attempt to capture/kill McGrath, and one explosion caused by Loveless later, our heroes meet with the President (Kline again, who at least gives the man gravitas), in Washington, who sets them on the trail of Loveless, a veritable lab's worth of missing scientists, and McGrath. Aboard their train, The Wanderer, we do get two good scenes. First, the enjoyably silly, in which a clearly uncomfortable West has to contend with the fact that the hollowed out head of the hapless scientist we began the film with is now being used as a magic lantern to track down McGrath, with Smith at least getting to have fun with Smith's disdain and squeamishness, even if it's simply one line repeated.
We then get, in the very next moment, the duo working together, to realise the image is flipped upside down and needs magnification. It's one of the few times the film allows its central duo to carry out non-bickering teamwork, and leads our duo to the figure of Loveless, who is holding a party at his plantation. The duo infiltrate and, arriving out of the exploding head of Abraham Lincoln, comes, with all the inevitability of a solid Hollywood actor absolutely mugging it in a not-very-good blockbuster, Kenneth Branagh.

If Smith and Kline take themselves too seriously, Loveless is the opposite problem. This is a man whose establishing moment is popping like a goddamn whack-a-mole out of the exploded neck-stump of Abraham Lincoln, to exclaim in his widest "I do declare" accent that he's alive and well, propelled forward by his steam-powered wheelchair to berate his audience for all the injuries and body parts that he gave up in his accident to support the Confederacy. There's as much subtlety in his performance as there is nuance in his plan-he wants revenge on the North, he's build horrifically powerful munitions to get it, and every scene he's on screen he's bellowing like a Hall of Presidents animatronic of Jefferson Davis about the South rising again. Loveless, thus, is a double-edged sword. At his best, he actually brings out the best in at least Smith-their back and forth laden with off-colour puns that would never make it into a major blockbuster in 2022 may be a tad on the cringy side, but at least these are two performances interacting with each other, rather than passing like ships in the night

At the worst, though, Branagh is a poorly accented car-crash of a performance, a tired old stereotype of the Southern plantation gentleman that better actors have made menacing and a truly fearful reflection of the period they represent, that does nothing more or less than bring the film to a crashing standstill every time he's on screen in the film's latter half. Moreover, his performance is so bad in places it positively reveals every flaw and problem hiding at the creaking interior of the film, from its nonsensical plot, to the poor editing of the film, to Loveless's ridiculous uniforms, to the dodgy CGI that matts out Branagh's legs, to the giant fucking mechanical fucking spider that forms the lynchpin of his plan, He is the best-and worst-thing about this film.

Unfortunately, the film does not end with his appearance. West soon finds himself on the way to being lynched by Loveless's party after bongo drumming on a woman's breasts (mistaking her for Gordon's previous costume), whilst Gordon, in full on mountain man disguise, frees an imprisoned dancing girl who reveals herself to be the daughter of one of the missing scientists, rescues West, and uncovers the next part of Loveless's plan-to put the Confederate soldiers under McGrath to the sword for surrendering.
Again, the film almost has a point, the scenes of the soldiers being mown down well-edited and impressively brutal, but Loveless is back to scenery buffet, shooting McGrath dead and making off on his train/tank, with our heroes giving pursuit, with a brief meet-cute with Salma Hayek's Rita, a character who'd be great if she had any characteristics other than charming and a tad klutzy, and if she had any narrative arc. Our heroes catch up with Loveless, only to find, via his train's embellishments, the villainous weapons-builder is now the hunter, and following another ramshackle setpiece, in which it's often difficult to work out what's happening where, our heroes are accidently hit with sleeping gas and captured by Loveless.

And then the film becomes unforgivably stupid. If Wild Wild West was actually any good, having our heroes having to first outrun the same killer circular saws whilst wearing magnetic collars, and then falling down a ravine to become stuck to each other before their ingenuity took hold and they freed themselves would have been the highlight of the movie, a chance for Smith and Kline to simply bounce off each other, to comedically spitball for a good ten minutes back and forth. It is none of these things. It is ten of the most painful minutes I have ever experienced in cinema-every single pratfall, every single line of dialogue, every single lazy bit of slapstick building like a migraine headache until you want to reach through the screen and throttle Smith and Kline to death to make the film stop. Fortunately, Gordon finds one of his tools, and he and West are free of their magnetic collars, and us of their antics.

Unfortunately, at this point, Loveless reappears with the Giant Fucking Mechanical Fucking Spider in tow. The Giant Fucking Mechanical Fucking Spider, a throwback to co-producer Jon Peters' Superman adaption that, by mandate had to include a giant robot spider (in the least insane part of the film's premise), is an admittedly impressive effect but it's simply too little too late, and is little more than an impressive visual spectacle for the film's finale. Chasing down the mech at a railroad spiking ceremony, our heroes arrive mid destruction, with Gordon and Grant captured, and West left for dead in a fast-paced if typically chaotic fight scene. Loveless, now settling down to a full banquet of scenery, in which he outlines his master-plan to the assembled generals of European powers, is suddenly accosted by a figure in Arabian clothing

This, unfortunately, is a crossdressing West, who somehow distracts-and titillates-Loveless long enough in a scene that frankly takes what's left of the film's sense and breaks it over its knee, letting the pieces drop to the ground. The finale, such that it is, is basically more of these audiovisual non-seqiteurs, until Loveless is dumped off the edge of a canyon-not before sprouting mechanical legs-his henchmen are defeated almost as soon as they are introduced, Smith manages to dump in several truly dreadful one liners, and the film comes to a crashing end with little fanfare, and our heroes stomp off into the sunset atop their Giant Fucking Mechanical Fucking Spider, now the first two members of the Secret Service. Never have I been so excit-

Is that Stevie Wonder. Is that Will Smith rapping over Stevie Wonder? Is that a 90s rehash of a famous franchise that cut its teeth in the 60s used for pure nostalgia? Is this a fairly shoehorned reference to sum up what we've watched. Yes, and yes. There are many bad movies that bring pleasure. Wild Wild West is not one of them. It is a cinematic biohazard, a leaching disastrous meltdown of a film, and whilst the cinematic fallout of the latter half of the 90s would stumble on a year or two, into cinematic aberrations like Battlefield Earth (2000), Evolution and Pearl Harbour (both 2001), none of these films cost nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. With the failure of Wild Wild West, the damage was done, the blood that had sustained cinema over the tumultuous post-Cold War decade was spent, and cinema would crash into a dark age that wouldn't truly end until the middle of the 2000s.

Wild Wild West is a perfect storm of a disastrous film; it may be by coincidence that I picked these five films, because they charted the decline of 90s cinema in the right places, but Wild Wild West is a summation of every mistake made along the way. Like Judge Dredd, it turns an action adventure romp into a dry and unfunny comedy. Like Waterworld, its colossal budget and high-concept plot become a hindrance, and without the charm of its central performances, and with CGI replacing practical effects, the film is lifeless and hollow. Like Batman and Robin, it skews its audience low and relies on star power to pull in increasingly indifferent audience. And like Godzilla, it totally misjudges that nostalgia and recognition of a familiar brand from years gone by will translate to ticket sales.

Neither Smith nor Sonnenfeld have truly recovered from this blot on their career-Smith may have become the leading man once more, his roles in the 2000s may be as big and bold as they were in the 90s, but Smith is no longer a colossus in the industry, and his roles became increasingly dramatic rather than purely entertainment based. By now, even that slap aside (perhaps the most hysterical overreaction to anything at the Oscars period...), Smith is as likely to appear in critical messes like Bright (2017) and
Gemini Man (2019), as he is to appear in moving fare like Collateral Beauty (2016) or solid entertainment like Bad Boys Forever (2019). Sonnenfeld hasn't made a good movie yet, aside from two workmanlike MIB sequels, and was last seen in action directing godawful, and in hindsight horrifying bodyswap film Nine Lives (one of the last major screen-roles of the disgraced Kevin Spacey to date).

But there's a couple of twists to this tale. Barely a month before the release of Wild Wild West, another nostalgic property, continuing a series started in the mid 1970s, roared back into cinemas, topped the box office for 1999, became the second-highest grossing film of all time at that point, (behind the equally nostalgic and effects-driven Titanic). That film, of course, was Star Wars Episode I. The 90s blockbuster may have been dying on the sands of the American West, but the 2000s was slowly arriving over the horizon, with an epicly scaled adaption of a 1950s fantasy novel trilogy shot back to back in New Zealand, and two adaptions of beloved comics in their vanguard. The movie world may have left the 90s behind, but a brave new world beckoned.

The other is this. A duo of Illinois filmmakers had approached Smith to be the star of their science fiction action movie, with Val Kilmer playing the mentor; with just one film under their belt, and their script full of science-fiction flights of fancy in a world created and run by machines, Smith eventually passes, and the role goes to a Canadian actor by the name of Keanu Reeves. That film, of course, is The Matrix, and it will go on to change action cinema forever, introduce intricate multimedia marketing campaigns to cinema, and will eventually herald in an era of cinema where intricate setpieces form the centre and narrative arcs of high-concept action movies. Smith may be magnanimous now, but given the colossal success of the franchise in the intervening years, it's hard to think of how cinema may have changed further still with Will Smith in the starring role...

This takes nothing away from how truly godawful Wild Wild West is. I have, to reiterate, seen 300 films in my time so far as a reviewer. From ten minutes in, this was on the top five worst I've experienced. It does not improve. It has no desire to improve. It gets worse. It is a film without merit, without charm, without anything to grasp onto of any discernable quality. I try to be fair to a film, to highlight where it may have at least tried something. My scrabbles to find constructive critique slide straight off, as though this film was purpose-built to simply kill the 90s film dead before the Millennium Bug blew every server in Hollywood sky-high.

Wild Wild West is the 1990s movie trying to die, in a colossally misjudged, ham-fisted, ham-acted piece of dreck that set the star of no less than Will Smith back a full decade, and killed the big-budget action adventure film stone dead for as long, and, like no other film I've covered, on this season or otherwise, may truly boast to be the worst film ever made.

Rating: Avoid at All Costs.

I am on holiday next week! Next review up 14th August. Why not support my recovery from Wild Wild West by subscribing to my Patreon from just £1/$1.20 a month! https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond