Review of Wild Wild West

Introduction

It`s taken me ages to get round to hiring and watching this film. This is partly due to the bad reviews it seems to have had generally, and partly that it always seems to be out at my local rental emporium. But it was in this time, and so home it came.

Despite its name, it`s not really a western in the western tradition. More a kind of Inspector Gadget in the Wild West. At least 2 other reviewers I know have compared parts of it to Back to the Future III, and it`s easy to see why.

And with a cast including Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh, you would be forgiven for expecting good things from this movie.

Video

A very good transfer here. It doesn`t really look like the West, but that`s intentional really as the film`s not supposed to look like a Western. Lots of nice colours and deep blacks make up a very good picture indeed.

Plenty of special effects in this movie (how else do you create an 80ft mechanical tarantula) and these transfer well to the smaller screen, and are probably just what the director intended. I`ll give you my thoughts later.

Audio

An excellent DD5.1 audio track available here, as you would expect from a big Hollywood film. There`s plenty of action for all of your speakers, what with the aforementioned mechanical tarantula, plus bullets ricocheting around, fireballs and general explosive mayhem.

Features

Quite a few extras here. First up is your standard 15 minute made for American TV "behind the scenes documentary", introduced by Salma Hayek who plays a damsel in distress of sorts in the film. Nothing much exciting here, and parts are repeated in other extras.

Then another series of 5 or 6 segments of 5-10 minutes each - these talk about costumes, special effects or some of the female characters. As Mark pointed out, this is full of the cast and crew saying how wonderful the other members of the cast and crew are, and this backslapping detracts from the odd snippets of interesting background that are tucked away.

There`s also a trailer, 2 music videos (the Wild Wild West music video is described as a continuation of the film) and also a brief making of for the Wild Wild West music video.

And there are cast and crew bios, but you probably know most of the stuff that appears on Smith`s and Kline`s anyway.

The one thing lacking is the commentary track that appears on the Region 1 version of the disc - this is allegedly due to the removal of a headbutt from the main feature.

Conclusion

So what`s the conclusion then.

A mixed bag. I too was puzzled by all the gadgets and gizmos given that this was supposed to be the 1800s. Obviously this was felt to be necessary to appeal to the film`s potential teenage audience (they`re not likely to go and see something that resembles a real western after all). Not that this should have been a real western, but these anachronisms were perhaps a bit annoying, whilst still being amusing.

There are quite a few slapstick gags, and plenty of jokes that seemed to be written by Professor Ron Obvious (apologies to Monty Python). When West (a black figure of authority in the American South) meets Loveless (a mad villain with no legs) they trade gags about being black or having no legs. Very cheap.

Will Smith is Will Smith and gives his typical performance, given what there was to work with. This film probably marks the end of a good run of movies, and it happens to everyone sometimes. Kevin Kline seemed to suffer most from the script. This is the Oscar winner from A Fish Called Wanda, and he just had a duff character. Kenneth Branagh is just totally over the top as the mad villain, and annoys at times.

All this said and done, this is a reasonably entertaining film, and there are some good moments. But there are lots of little niggles which distract you from what`s going on. If you fancy a fairly mindless film for a bit of a laugh, this might fit the bill, but perhaps only if everything else has already been hired out.