Wild Wild West

Based on the ’60s television show, Wild Wild West follows a pair of mismatched U.S. Marshals (Will Smith’s Jim West and Kevin Kline’s Artemus Gordon) as they attempt to prevent a diabolical madman (Kenneth Branagh’s Arliss Loveless) from effectively taking over the United States – with their ongoing efforts both assisted and hindered by a beautiful burlesque performer named Rita Escobar (Salma Hayek). Filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld admittedly does a nice job of handling the movie’s unapologetically larger-than-life sensibilities, and it’s worth noting that the film fares surprisingly well in its early stages – with the palpable chemistry between Smith and Kline’s respective characters serving the proceedings well and ensuring that one can’t help but root for Jim and Artemus’ success. The increasingly uneven bent of S.S. Wilson, Brent Maddock, Jeffrey Price, and Peter S. Seaman’s screenplay ultimately wreaks havoc on the movie’s momentum, however, and there’s little doubt that the movie succumbs to a hit-and-miss atmosphere that slowly-but-surely becomes more miss than hit (eg an endless interlude in which Smith’s character attempts to pass himself off as a woman). It consequently goes without saying that the action-heavy second half is rarely as exciting or as engrossing as it probably should be, with the progressively less-than-compelling vibe exacerbated by a pervasive emphasis on aggressively silly instances of comedy. By the time the frenetic, special-effects-heavy finale rolls around, Wild Wild West has certainly established itself as a sporadically amusing yet disastrously overblown adaptation that wears out its welcome to a distressingly demonstrable degree.

** out of ****