Wild Wild West (1999) All anyone remembers about this one......it's the movie that sent the Will Smith Summer BlockBuster Express flying off the rails........(ironic, since a chunk of it took place on a train....)
......the first time that Big Willie swung for the fences.......and like the poem's Mighty Casey, struck out...........
But we couldn't help checking in on it again, if for no other reason to ascertain if it's really as disastrous as critics and audiences first judged.
Surprise, surprise. It isn't.
Yes, it's unadulterated summer movie junk.........taken from a beloved old TV series and then put through the Major Studio gauntlet.......multiple screenplay drafts (guaranteeing an incoherent mess of a final shooting script).....bloated special effects budget, with no thought whatsoever given to how the effects would integrate with the story.......and a 'storyline' that's nothing more than random sequences stitched together, peppered with loads of comedic sound bites to mollify the egos of the its stars.......
So you'll not hear us deny that it's a senseless goulash of a movie.......a patchwork of scenes designed to make a great trailer that'll lure the suckers in on a hot July 4rth weekend.....
What it comes down to.......can you actually sit and watch it? Is it the least bit entertaining to sit through......
Surprise surprise. We sat through it just fine. Cause in our long, long film-viewing life, we've sat through a hell of a lot worse movies than this one....(especially ones that were wildly overpraised at the time of their release....)
Not that the distance of almost 21 years has improved it any. It's still overproduced, barely written, desperate and exhausting in its attempts to deliver all the wham-bams that the multi-plex crowds expected from their summer movies.......
But really, it's as awkwardly harmless as the giant CGI mechanical spider that goes clunking and thunking through the movie like one of Spielberg's 'Jurassic Park' brontos......and Will Smith and Kevin Kline do manage to carve out something of a comedic timing rapport.......
We suspect the ever growing pop culture media machine brought the hammer down on 'Wild Wild West' as a celebration of seeing the first Big Willie Behemoth to go belly up at the box-office.........(think of it as a not-so-hidden guilty pleasure, the sight of an ultra-successful superstar deflated like a punctured Thanksgiving Day parade balloon......on the flip side, the masses also equally enjoy a crushed celeb overcome adversity to climb right back on top again.......that's the
show-biz, baby....)
Sitting back and letting this misbegotten movie wash over us didn't bother us at all......we chuckled a bit at Smith and Kline's antics, Selma Hayak's see-through pajama bottoms, even Kenneth Branagh's strictly southern-fried comic book villainy that makes the Marvel bad guys seem modest and restrained in comparison.
The movie was, after all, designed as junky fun..... like a bagful of fried oreo cookies at the State Fair.........and if you switch off enough brain cells.....you might find it so, too. 2 & 1/2 stars
(**1/2)
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