By Kyle Martinak
Fun story: during my recent honeymoon, I turned on the TV in my stateroom. Sure, I was on a cruise down the Mexican coast with deck parties, swimming pools, spas, casinos, and miniature nightclubs all on board. But, eh…I just kinda wanted to watch a crappy movie. And boy, did I watch one. The worst attempt at edgy/family-friendly action/adventure futuristic western comedies. Actually, probably the only attempt. Strap on your steampunk goggles and your racist joke book, because today we examine the head-less, ear-less, leg-less, pants-less, Lovelace corpse of Wild Wild West.
BREIF SYNOPSIS:
Just in the interest of time, I’m going to skip over mountains of bad racist jokes, paraplegic jokes, gay jokes, and a sophomoric love for the word “ass.”
So, we enter the story in a wooded area at night. A caption tells us this is “Louisiana, 1869.” Okay, good to know. Suddenly, we’re following a terrified man as he runs through a field shrieking nonsensical phrases. Wow, what a lovely metaphor for this whole movie. He says shit like, “MADMAN!” and “GIANT SPIDER!” Oookay. Short story, our hero is quickly taken out by a flying disc with a Spider-Man logo on it. This disc is retrieved by some Confederate beardy dude who remarks that scientists are supposed to be smart. Huh, I guess the crazy dude was a scientist? Hey, that’s the guy who tucked his sack back as Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. Hey, Ted Levine! Why do you have a brass horn for an ear?
Oh, okay. We then cut to a small western-type town, still at night. We know this is a transition because there’s another caption telling us, “Morgan, West Virginia.” Here, we have Will Smith swimming naked in a water tower with a beautiful lady while he simultaneously spies on a nearby brothel. What a pimp. She exposits directly to the camera that he’s Jim West, and he exposits directly to the camera that he’s waiting for a General Bloodbath McGrath to show up. Oh, and the guys loading a cart outside exposit to each other their next stop is New Orleans. This is so horribly written. Wow. “Hilarity” and “action” ensue when the water tower is knocked down and naked West comes sliding out like Napoleon did in San Dimas, CA. He fights some outlaws and chases down a runaway wagon full of nitroglycerin (again, we are given this bit of exposition about nitroglycerin from West, directly into the camera).
In the brothel (another effing caption has to tell me this is “Meanwhile, across town”) Ted Levine shows up and starts enjoying the company of Kevin Kline in a fat-suit and drag. Kline easily looks like the most disgusting thing ever. Not the most disgusting woman ever, mind you. For that, he would have to look in any way female, and he doesn’t. Oh, wait. Levine just dripped earwax out of his brass-horn ear prosthetic. That’s worse. Some komedy ensues where Kline sings in falsetto and rebuffs other johns with Looney Tunes gadgets.
As West stops the nitroglycerin carriage, he is apparently on a cliff overlooking the brothel. That…is some interesting geography you have there, movie. He spies Ted Levine and confirms directly to the camera, “General Bloodbath McGrath.” Holy hell, I’m tired of this. We cut back to the brothel, where Kline hypnotizes Levine into acting like a dog in order to interrogate him…hmm.
West busts in to kill Levine, and the henchmen attack! Eventually the brothel becomes a wacky fight zone. Ted Levine escapes, leaving Cowboy Will and fat-drag Kline threatening each other. Meanwhile some shady folks are watching this from a long way away, and some broad with a thick Eurotrash accent narrates the previous scene for us. ‘Kay. Oh, turns out one of these folks is Kenneth Branagh, but we don’t get a great look at him. He essentially pushes the cart full of nitro off the cliff to blow up the brothel, making a Dr. Claw escape.
We then shift scenes to Washington, D.C. I…guess our heroes got out of that massive fireball okay. His mission totally screwed up, Cowboy Will heads to the White House to talk to President U.S. Grant. Out comes Kevin Kline again, as President Grant. He calls Will a dickhead in so many words and praises the shit out of US Marshal Artemis Gordon (fat-drag Kline), until it’s revealed that this is Gordon, praising himself. The real President Grant walks in (also played by Kline, doing the same exact character. So the real Grant and Gordon’s Grant impersonation are virtually identical). Grant introduces the two, making light of Gordon’s intellect killing him someday, then quipping that West shoots first, second, third, then asks questions. It’s this line that makes me realize that West has fired exactly one shot. And it’s at the ceiling of the Oval Office. Grant orders the two to investigate General McGrath in connection to a marzipan cake covered in tarantulas. No bullshit. The cake evidently came with a note demanding the surrender of the US government. Apparently the scientists we’ve been hearing about have been kidnapped and forced to build a powerful weapon for this…cake…person.
So our heroes are partnered up, and one is a shoot-first brooding cowboy, the other is a cultured inventor and master of disguise. They hop a locomotive complete with living quarters and all of Gordon’s costumes/equipment/booby-traps, and instantly start bickering. This includes completely illogical gizmos hitting West in the face, and flipping both men under the speeding train. Then they CSI their way to a clue left on the body of the scientist from the opening scene. Glad that finally paid off. Oh, and this scene is punctuated by the “comical” use of a man’s severed head, and Will Smith incessantly repeating “That’s a man’s head!” as if trying to convince himself it’s a funny line.
The clue leads to a party in New Orleans. We already knew this because of the subtle exposition back in West Virginia. So did West, which is why he suggested it in the previous scene as their destination. So, we the audience knew, they the characters knew. But we got the severed head scene anyway. Gordon suggests they infiltrate the costume party…in costume. West, being the no-nonsense type (despite the water-slide and joking around with guns and other nonsense stuff he’s initiated), decides he’s just going in. Oh, also…five solid minutes of talking about boobs. As if the pricks making this were writing a “Who’s On First?” clone entitled, “Touch My Breast.”
The party turns out to be a big “I’m ALIVE! HAHAHAHA!” reveal for a character we have not been introduced to before, so we don’t care. But we have seen him before, so we already know he’s alive. It’s Arliss Lovelace, a supposedly mad scientist who fought for the Confederacy. He’s in a steam-powered wheelchair, wearing an overly-sculpted fake goatee, and he’s played by Kenneth Branagh. He and West trade tasteless quips for a solid four minutes while Lovelace’s bondage-clad assistant (played by Bai Ling) watches. Then they just decide to leave it be. I guess. No consequences when the hero and villain meet. Huh. West goes off to follow Ted Levine around, while Lovelace inexplicably enters his study with…Ted Levine. They agree upon a place to meet, draw a map, and make plans for a weapons deal.
Aside: I’m not sure what West’s plan is. The man he is pursuing (McGrath) is in the building, meeting nefariously with the guy who is clearly in charge of the weapons plot (Lovelace) and instead of foiling the plot or arresting them or…anything, he simply listens in on their meeting and takes steps to follow them later. President’s best men, my ass. It’s almost like he’s supposed to be a spy instead of a cop—oops, sorry. I meant “Army Captain.”
After West infiltrates (re: walks directly into, in full view of everyone) Lovelace’s study, he pulls the old “shade-in-the-blank-notepad-to-see-what-was-previously-written” trick that was also used in The Big Lebowski. He gets sexually suggestive with Bai Ling, then kills her and the five dudes who were standing around in fake paintings the whole time. Bye Bai Ling (heh).
Alls well that ends well, it seems. Until West mistakes a fat woman at the party as Gordon, because she happens to be dressed in the same exact outfit Gordon was, with the same hair. West makes a quip and slaps her boobs around, and is instantly marched out to be hung by a bunch of Southern plantation owners. Will Smith then flails around in an obvious attempt at improvised riffing that dies a horrible death within thirty seconds. While all this is going on, Salma Hayek is apparently a stripper–or something–who is being locked in Lovelace’s bondage room. Gordon, dressed as a French fur-trapper, rescues her with some kinda compressed-air saw built into his boot. This synopsis is making me write very strange sentences now.
Thankfully (maybe) Gordon was the one who supplied the rope for West’s hanging, which is elastic–or something. West escapes by sling-shooting himself from the gallows and onto Gordon and Hayek’s escape wagon.
After a quick bit of exposition introducing Hayek as Rita, an “entertainer” looking for one of the missing scientists, her father, West races ahead of the wagon to intercept McGrath at the spot on the map he copied in Lovelace’s study. At said spot, Lovelace is already there on a riverboat with a bunch of foreign weapons dealers (I think), giving Ted Levine shit about being dubbed “The Butcher of New Liberty.” We, the audience, have no idea what this precisely means since we’ve never heard anything about McGrath except that he was a general in the Confederacy. Apparently bored, Lovelace cuts this development short by double-crossing McGrath and his men by mowing them down with a big steampunk tank. By the way, McGrath had a small army waiting on the shore to receive weapons. Now they’re dead. What baffles me is the failure of the US government to disband a Confederate battalion of troops four years after the Civil War. Anyway, Lovelace is using this as a demonstration of the tank’s capabilities only to assure the nearby perspective buyers that he’s cooking up something way better. What a shitty salesman. He then buggers off with his big tank, which actually converts into an armored train.
West and Gordon and Rita show up just in time to find a legion of dead guys arranged like a crop circle. West then gives us more exposition about how the tank was used on a free slave camp called New Liberty, at the orders of McGrath, who is now begging forgiveness and revealing Lovelace as the mastermind, just before dying. Lucky bastard gets out of this faster than I do. Rita lets them know that she overheard that Lovelace is headed for Utah, where President Grant is dedicating the recently completed continental railroad. So…much…exposition.
So, that bit out of the way, we now get to the “humorous” portion of the movie. This involves West and Gordon openly salivating over Rita, fighting over her affections, and staring at her ass. Their train is headed for Utah (although we get no more helpful captions like in the first act), and the next morning they wake to find Lovelace’s train is just up ahead. They caught the bastard. Easy. As they rise to meet their foe, West discovers that Gordon has been adding gadgets to the cowboy’s wardrobe, including a tiny knife that springs out of his boot toe. Isn’t that from a James Bond movie?
Anyhow, Lovelace’s train sprouts big ol’ erector-set spider legs and rises off the tracks, so the hero train passes underneath. Now Lovelace is following them. You would think this is the reveal of the big mechanical spider we all know is coming, but no. This is a different mechanical spider. The crappy one…that was only designed to kill McGrath’s men. The heroes react by screwing around with the under-the-train gizmos in an attempt to…I’m not sure. Let’s just skip forward a bit.
When Lovelace derails them with a rocket launcher of some kind, Rita uses one of Gordon’s dumbass booby-traps to incapacitate all three of them to be captured. This results in Rita being taken hostage for no apparent reason (Lovelace has no motivation or anything to gain by taking her) and Gordon and West are trapped in a little electric fence pen with big magnetic dog collars. Lovelace makes off with their train and shouts his destination to them: SpiderCanyon. Wasn’t it Utah? Well, maybe that’s in Utah. By the way, where are we right now? Nebraska? Oklahoma? While I didn’t need a caption to tell me something was happening “across town,” one would be helpful here just to let me know if they’re days, hours, or minutes away from Spider Canyon, Utah.
So, West and Gordon get to run around in a corn field being chased by the big Spider-Man discs, which looks in no way like a toy commercial for something that fires little foam discs. They find a comical way out of it, and spend the night in the desert. West confides that he was raised by Indians after escaping slavery, and his family was at New Liberty when Lovelace/McGrath attacked. We also get a ham-fisted piece of foreshadowing when West explains to Gordon that a wasp will kill a tarantula using its power of flight as advantage. Sure, that won’t be back in less than twenty minutes.
They catch up remarkably fast the next day and we get a big reveal moment for Lovelace’s ultimate weapon: a Big CGI Steampunk Mech-Spider™ that shoots fireballs. They watch as it demolishes a rock formation, and decide that they could use a plan and some supplies.
They find their train just sitting where Lovelace abandoned it, and they set about arming themselves. Gordon suggests building a flying machine to get a wasp’s-eye attack position. For no apparent reason, West refuses and they just abandon the idea and ride off on horses that have mysteriously appeared for their convenience. This seems pointless, as we know the flying machine will appear later because of the hammer-to-the-brain foreshadowing. But then we cut to President Grant at a Continental Railroad ceremony, and we instantly realize that there’s one more stupid bit that they set up an hour ago. Lovelace enters with his Big CGI Steampunk Mech-Spider™, causing all of Grant’s protectors to piss themselves and run away. Grant stands his ground until Gordon shows up disguised as Grant. Lovelace, showing a remarkably logical streak, kidnaps both Grants. Meanwhile, West climbs up to the spider-cock pit (I probably could have punctuated that phrase better) and is promptly shot in the chest and falls 80 feet to his doom…I wish.
So…good God this third Act is padded…Lovelace takes all his captives back to Spider Canyon to his secret base and sets up a grand auditorium, complete with his foreign dignitary buddies and captives, including the scientists, as a big audience. He proceeds to whip out the biggest Showboat-Grandstand-Premature-Excessive-Celebration Villain Monologue I’ve ever witnessed. His plan is about dismantling the U.S. and selling the territories back to their supposedly original owners. Spain gets Florida and the Deep South, Mexico gets California, Texas, and the Southwest. Britain gets the old thirteen colonies back, and hopefully France honors the return policy on the Louisiana Purchase. Oh, everything else Lovelace keeps including my home state of Oregon. Keeping Portland Weird, indeed.
Meanwhile, West wakes from his bullet-and-impact concussion and reveals that Gordon built him a bullet-proof chain mail vest, too. Jeez. He walks back to his train, again. No weapons have been left behind this time, so he scrounges around and finds a little one-shot derringer that Gordon hides in a belt buckle. Then he looks longingly at one of Gordon’s costumes for a while, and we the audience realize the shoot-first cowboy is going to grow as a character and learn the art of disguise and subtlety.
NOPE! Back in the big-ass auditorium, Lovelace demands Grant signs a surrender notice or Gordon will be shot in the head. Before the blessed shot can occur, some sort of Arabian Nights music starts up and West dances into the room dressed as a gypsy-harem-belly-dancer-girl. He captivates a befuddled audience and plays to the affection of Lovelace while stealing handcuff keys and passing them to Gordon. Subtlety obliterated. Hey, what time is it? That’s right! Time for another boob joke! This one in the form of West’s fake knobs becoming flamethrowers and roasting Lovelace’s men. Austin Powers called, he wants that three-year-old joke back.
Somehow, flaming tits notwithstanding, Lovelace escapes to his mech-spider with President Grant as his captive. Wasn’t this the president famous for drunken brawling? What, is he afraid of punching a cripple or something? Anyway, Our two heroes are reunited and decide to…really? Really? REALLY?!
They go back to the abandoned hero train. For the third time, now. This time, Gordon builds a Leonardo DaVinci style flying machine in what seems like it could be a few minutes. Oh, and their train conductor gives them a shit-ton of Molotov cocktails because why not. They have another comical buddy sequence where they test a hang-glider attached to a penny-farthing bicycle. That goes on for…almost ten minutes, or so it feels. Then they go after the big-ass spider. While this is supposed to be a bold maneuver inspired by the tarantula/wasp thing from earlier, this is a complete cluster-fuck from moment one. For starters, the tarantula couldn’t sling fireballs at the wasp, the wasp couldn’t drop mini-napalm on the tarantula, and…ah, who gives a shit?
Too late to make a long story short, Lovelace tries yet again to make Grant sign a surrender statement. When Grant refuses, Lovelace uses his photon torpedoes to demolish a little pioneer town. He sure is intent on making this overthrow of the union legal and official, especially when you consider the amount of wanton destruction, kidnap, and murder that he has no problem with. Almost feels like this plot got away from the writers.
West and Gordon, resolute to stop this nonsense, come flying in on their glider-cycle and instantly do it all wrong. Jim lets a big “Yee-haw!” loose in an effort to convince us this is a period piece and that he’s a cowboy. This alerts the villain to their presence. Then Gordon flies his contraption under the big spider, thus giving Lovelace a clear shot with his photon torpedoes and rendering their flight advantage null. Lovelace takes the gimme shot and misses, so one of his Eurotrash hench-women blow them out of the sky with a gatlin-gun.
They crash right onto the spider-cock pit, which is now suddenly the size of a soundstage. This crash results in the death of random Eurotrash girl #2. Lovelace gets pissed off and drops West through a trapdoor that West happened to be standing directly on top of. This lands West into the industrial-looking bowels of the spider. Spider bowels. Here in the spider bowels, West fights three goons (each with their own gimmick to sell an action figure) until he kicks their asses and hangs one of them with a chain. Then a fourth one comes out. This guy is revealed to be made of metal—or something. Under his skin is a layer of metal. It hurts to punch him. Whatever. They fight until Metal Dude…short-circuits. He literally blows a microchip or something in his head and keels over. Nothing causes it. It just happens. I guess you could say that about the whole movie. This whole “fighting henchmen” bit seems like it was done in reshoots and added in to make the final face-off a little longer, but that’s just my speculation.
My God, this never ends. I’m going to make the rest very quick. Lovelace drops down to the spider bowels and morphs his wheelchair into Doctor Octopus. He fights West, Gordon uses his tiny belt buckle gun (thus reciprocating West’s attempt to learn each other’s methods) to shoot the hydraulic fluid out of Lovelace’s legs. Then Gordon and Grant fight and defeat Eurotrash girls #1 and #3. Then the (apparently auto-piloted) spider is heading for a cliff’s edge. Even though we’re supposedly in a canyon. SpiderBowelsCanyon.
West and Lovelace end up hanging on for dear life and…begin trading tasteless jokes about cripples and black people…again. Then West pulls the lever on Lovelace’s chair that will send them both plummeting. This would be halfway interesting if West were killing himself in order to win, but he isn’t. He grabs the dead henchman hanging on a chain from before.
Fade to black, then fade back in. Grant finally finishes the railroad ceremony, then makes Gordon and West the very first Secret Service agents in American history. Then he takes their train and leaves without them, like a dick. Then Rita hugs and thanks them, revealing that her sexual charms and prancing around them half-naked was so she could find her husband, who she previously stated was her father. So she’s married, and yet was still working as an old-west saloon whore. Anyway, she rides off with her husband (who looks like he could be her father). Hmm, seems like the writers tacked that on at the last second, like they forgot all about her. This leaves Gordon and West to ride off into the sunset (which sets in the West, and yet they are headed for Washington…which is East of Utah). The final nail in the coffin is the hokey reveal that they are riding off on Lovelace’s Big CGI Steampunk Mech-Spider™, available as a cheap plastic playset for all ages.
Cue the shitty Will Smith rap song, complete with non-threatening lyrics. Edginess sold separately, originally written music not included. This synopsis took 3,736 words and two days of my life.
EXAMINATION:
Why did that take so long? Because there’s no real plot to this movie. More like an amalgamation of scenes wrapped around poorly done action beats. When you cannot properly summarize the plot of a movie, you devolve into describing the unconnected scenes. I apologize.
So, it’s time to dig past surface observation on Wild Wild West. Well, like Lost in Space, this is a late-nineties remake of a 1960’s television show. Unlike Lost in Space, the creators of this film were not concerned with honoring the original and far more concerned with grabbing an immediate audience and exploiting the money-making tools available. This is nothing new or unique, though. Hell, the same can be said for the Dukes of Hazzard movie, which was kind of crap but by no means pure torture like this. So what is the difference? Why is Wild Wild West more than garden-variety bad?
Let’s start with the script as always: Wild Wild West seemed like someone was trying to ape Men in Black (also directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and starring Will Smith in a buddy-action-comedy) while grossly misinterpreting what made it good. Black humor does not mean “be racist” or “people die in a funny way.” Black humor requires a basic understanding of irony or schadenfreude. Gross-out moments aren’t funny because they’re gross either; they are funny because they are inappropriate or unexpected. And heart…let’s not pretend there was any heart in this movie and move on. More and more, it looks like the basic idea for a script was present here but something was lost in translation.
Okay, I just checked on it…this movie had six people listed as writers on it. Six. Mystery solved. In case you’re skimming this long-ass article, this is the reason why this movie sucks so hard. I’ll continue as normal, but…come on. This is it. On what planet does it take two people to come up with a story, and four people to put it in screenplay format? The sad part is that an impartial seventh person must have been in charge of reading through this script with a big yellow highlighter and marking the plot inconsistencies that we didn’t see. This revelation accounts for all the disjointed scene changes and the repeated information that we had to endure. It also accounts for the wildly inconsistent characters and the excruciatingly long joke riffs. When four people are locked in a room and told to write a scene where a black man and a cripple make fun of each other for being black and crippled, you will have a scene four times longer than it should be.
But this still doesn’t account for the really bad special effects or the really bad acting.
Will Smith is apparently quite ashamed of this movie. Well so am I, and I didn’t work on it. He should definitely be ashamed of his performance in it. Everyone should, really. Smith took three steps backward in his career for this movie, as he is performing like a sit-com actor. He’s mugging for the camera, pausing for laughs and applause, and hiding his disinterest behind a mask of silly rubber-face moves. Branagh is chewing so hard on the scenery I’m surprised he didn’t break a blood vessel. Kline plays an eccentric inventor with all the kinetic energy of an overripe pear. He seems to be trying for charmingly befuddled, a subdued Hugh Grant thing to (I’m guessing) balance the high school drama class tomfoolery that Smith was allowed to get away with and the non-committal detachment that Hayek gave. Serious, Hayek—who usually gives everything she has despite the dubiousness of the project or script—seemed like she was mentally cleaning out her refrigerator during certain scenes.
As far as special effects go, have you ever seen such an expensive 1999 movie that looked like it could have been made in 1969? Aside from computer-generated material, this movie looks like proof of an old piece of Hollywood trivia…that many westerns were made in the first half of the twentieth century because they were so cheap to make and props/costumes/horses/sets were so easy to reuse. Every outdoor background in this film is obviously artificial, either digital or matte painting. The giant mech-spider looks like someone super-imposed something from an anime into this movie. And even the practical effects suck. Any of Gordon’s or Lovelace’s gadgets that are rendered as physical props or set-pieces would be very impressive if this were a student film. But it wasn’t. This movie cost $170 million. You would expect, for $170 million dollars in 1999, that the little pop-out boxing glove Kline uses to punch out a drunk in the first ten minutes would look like it’s delivering a punch. You would expect the hang-glider/penny-farthing contraption would look less like a paper airplane. You would expect Kline to be a convincing woman in his fat-suit. You would…let’s simplify this. You would expect this $170 million special effects reel to look like it cost $170 million. And it doesn’t.
Redundant, reductive script written by 6 people – Information is repeated, characters vary wildly in tone/intelligence/actions, joke sessions go on for ever. This is clearly what makes this simple cash grab worse than bad.
All-Star cast doesn’t give a crap – While fulfilling their contracts to appear, each member of the principal cast demonstrated what evils they are capable of. Smith’s bad acting habits, Branagh’s bad acting choices, Hayek’s laziness, and Kline’s attempts to tone it back did nothing to lift the wings of this dying quail. But in all fairness…would any of us do any better with the material?
Practical effects and digital effects look shoddy – For a movie as hilariously expensive as this, it looks cheap. Dirt cheap. Of course, this may be hindsight talking (in terms of CGI, this may have looked great in 1999) but everything down to the props and sets look like this is a parody of a certain era that never occurred.
Cause of Death: Redundant, reductive script written by 6 people
CONCLUSIONS:
Let’s face it, the effects issues can be explained by, “This is a bullshit script. Let’s just finish.” And the bad acting can be explained by, “This is a bullshit script. Let’s just finish.” Meanwhile, the bullshit script…how does one explain that?
I can only assume, being a writer myself, that the six people called upon to write this movie were attempting something enjoyable. There was a basic three-act structure (albeit with an overlong second act and an extremely padded third), characters were given personality attributes that separated them from each other (whether those were relevant or actually demonstrated is a different story), and there are events and exposition that attempt to excuse or explain or inform the nine-minute dick jokes, the consequence-free action sequences, and the increasingly painful dress-up comedy.
But that’s the real problem with this script: the important parts of the plot are merely set-ups for the bad parts that dominate the rest of it. There are some great things one writer could do here. For instance, the parallel of West learning to use disguise and gadgetry instead of brute force while Gordon learns that direct conflict (and firing guns) are necessary aspects of his job. That’s character development. These two characters changed each other. Goodness! Too bad it’s shoehorned in with terrible jokes and clunky foreshadowing so we don’t care. And that whole good idea probably came from one of six writers, so it was promptly forgotten by the insipid collective.
By the way, just for the sake of conclusive deduction…let’s take a look at who those writers were:
-(Story By) John and Jim Thomas. Writers of Predator, Executive Decision, and story credits on, er, Mission to Mars.
- (Screenplay) S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock. Writers of the Short Circuit series, the Tremors series, and effing Ghost Dad.
- (Screenplay) Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. Writers of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Doc Hollywood. They must have been locked in a torture chamber after Wild Wild West, since their next three projects were the live-action Grinch movie, Last Holiday with Queen Latifah, and Shrek the Third.
Well, that certainly paints a picture.
If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say the production company brought in the Thomas brothers to write a treatment. But it was too dark, too action-oriented, too…nineties. So, the screenplay was handed to Price and Seaman to add some charming buddy-comedy and some Southern-fried humor. But their version was probably too character-driven for this big-budget family-friendly special effects extravaganza. So it was handed to Wilson and Maddock with the explicit instructions to “make it funnier” and “add more gadget stuff.” Which they…attempted.
This explains why the buddy-cop aspects of this movie were pushed aside early in the first act in favor of Tremors-esque “blowing shit up because I’m a redneck” ideas and Short Circuit type of old-timey comic sensibility and techno-humor (i.e. no real concept of how technology works, or what makes it funny). Wilson and Maddock, based on their work here and elsewhere, strike me as a partnership between that annoying kid from high school who wanted to tell you all about how he’s a psychopath and how he once blew up a car with an M-80 and that pathetic little bastard in high school who recites “Who’s On First?” by himself in order to impress no one.
PRIME SUSPECT:
So, we have our guilty parties for why the script is such a piece of crap, but in Godfather Part II parlance, who gave the order? I mean, this result is to be expected when a simple appendectomy surgery is assigned to two stooges in a butcher shop. But who is responsible for their involvement to begin with?
Producers. That’s the short answer. But it’s also the unfair answer. On Wild Wild West alone, I count twelve names as producers. Surely not all of them could be blamed for this. I’ll go ahead and remove the six “executive producers” immediately, since that credit is honorary at best. Essentially, anyone who is entitled to gross points must be listed as a producer, so I won’t fault a bunch of industry people who invested their time or money in a project that was sold as “Men in Black in the old west with a giant spider!” At the time, I probably would have written a check for that.
Of the remaining six names, we have two “co-producers,” two “associate producers,” and two people listed much more succinctly as “producer.” Well, let’s start with “co-producer.” That means these are the glorified assistants of the “producers” who did all the legwork to develop the project creatively with the studio and the director. Can’t give them shit for doing what they were told and getting paid to work in showbiz. “Associate producer” typically refers to the much more necessary and much less attractive jobs of budget negotiations, time management, and union regulations. Those poor people have my deepest sympathy in this case.
I guess that leaves the two main “producers.” One is Barry Sonnenfeld, the director. So…I guess a portion of blame really can land on the director/producer this time. Unless someone can convince me his involvement was forced upon him, Sonnenfeld is definitely a co-conspirator to wrongful production. Maybe he thought it was good while he was making it (doubtful). Maybe (like Will Smith) they threw so much money at him, including gross points, that he had to say “Fuck it,” and go through the motions, waiting for it to be over. That seems highly likely.
The other producer listed is Jon Peters. I really wanted to avoid bashing on Peters for this movie, mostly because he takes such a retroactive shellacking thanks to Kevin Smith’s long story about their working together. In said story, Wild Wild West is the unexpected punch-line, and the internet now accepts it as common knowledge that Jon Peters made this movie just so he could have a giant spider revealed in the third act. While I’m sure Mr. Peters is quite the arachnophile and that this little story explains quite a bit of stupid shit in this movie, it certainly doesn’t explain why this movie appears to be so needlessly expensive, so hopelessly adrift without plot, and so garish in its celebration of itself.
However, Peters has demonstrated in his long career a basic misunderstanding of the moviemaking process, if not complete ineptitude as a contributor to a project. Going off Kevin Smith’s tale as well as numerous stories and interviews (including a depressing tale from Peters’ would-be biographer), the man seems to have a tendency to throw in little tidbits that he can call his own (be it a giant spider, a new look for Superman, or a new character designed purely to be reproduced as a toy) or at the very least he is ego-driven and oblivious to money concerns. It is apparently common knowledge that Peters could not be bothered to give a flying fuck about the studio’s money or the budget of a project, because it simply isn’t his problem.
I guess Peters is my primary suspect in the dismantling of a fairly basic, middle-of-the-road movie that by all means should have been fun, if forgettable. He’s the only name attached to this who could take a 1999 Will Smith movie and turn it into the most expensive pile of garbage since…well, that other gigantic, CGI-infested, desert-landscape crappy movie that came out in 1999…that we will not speak of.
