The future, as presented in Wild Wild West, the latest Will Smith vehicle, is charmingly retro.
Unlike the common sci-fi conceit, where a story takes us to a distant past ("A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...") where ancient history looks surprisingly like our modern-day fantasy of the future, Wild Wild West unfolds in the post-Civil War reconstruction.
This is an unstable time when former slaves are struggling to assume their rightful places in free society, and the former enemies on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line are hoping to put their differences behind them.
Here's where the story diverges from reality: Down in New Orleans, in a terrifically gothic mansion that positively drips madness and perversion, one Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh) has kidnapped the best scientists in every field to implement his dream of overthrowing the government of President Ulysses S. Grant through the creation of powerful futuristic weapons.
It's against this insidious plot that President Grant unleashes his two best US Marshals: James T. West (Will Smith), a swashbuckling, shoot first, ask questions later gunslinger, and Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline), a quirky and fastidious master of invention and disguise.
Gordon and West are arch-rivals, not buddies, and the tension of their forced alliance drives much of the film. Just like in the 1960s television series of the same name, which starred Robert Conrad as West, the reluctant partners roar off into the west on board the Wanderer, a marvelous luxury train outfitted with a Bondian assortment of tricks: ejection seats, trick pool balls that give off sleeping gas (except the 8 ball, which, well...), and hidden weapons all over the place.
Gordon and West clash in every imaginable way, each obviously thinking the other is a buffoon, until eventually they begin to appreciate and even depend on each other's eccentricities. Along the way they rescue the damsel in distress, a necessary element of every western. In this case, she's played by the lovely Salma Hayek and her role in the movie is to be, well, the lovely Salma Hayek whose crowning moment in the film comes when she shows us her butt.
However cunning he is, Dr. Loveless' futurism is set squarely in the Industrial Revolution. No Death Stars or tractor beams for this villain. He'd rather take on the forces of decency from a secret hideout, Spider Canyon, tucked away in the frontier outback of New Mexico, where he's built his own freakish compound that looks like the kind of city J.P. Morgan might have hallucinated on a bad acid trip. It's here that the kidnapped scientists have constructed a gigantic, 80-foot tall hydraulic and steel tarantula that roams the desert, a juggernaut of grinding gears and levers in battleship dimensions and dripping with arachnid horror.
The plot, while hardly a throwaway, is somewhat incidental to Wild Wild West. The story is really just a skeleton (like that iron Tarantula) on which director Barry Sonnenfeld hangs Will Smith's irresistible "What, me?" charm.
The choice to cast Smith in the role originally played by Conrad in the TV series seems curious at first but is actually a very smart move. What would be simply the story of a white hero with a white sidekick chasing a white villain becomes an opportunity for lots of well-done racial humor.
Many of the film's best moments depend on the unlikely situation of a black man elevated to hero stature in the immediate post-Civil War era. The only time Sonnenfeld allows the race card to fail is in the film's most earnest moment, when West explains why he's so adamant about catching Loveless in the movie's most overwrought scene. You can practically see the executives sitting around the studio lot saying, "OK, now, we need a scene that explains West's motivation, Sonnenfeld, so the audience will get it."
Smith doesn't need to convince us to believe he's on the side of righteousness. It's in his face, and that's why they pay him US$20 million a film. We got it, already, guys. Let's just see him kick some more ass!
Kline, of course, could play himself sleeping and still be funny. He's so good that it sometimes seems the deliberate humor of the script actually takes some of the wind out of his physical performance. He's got that Gene Wilder gift of saying more with a single look than most actors do in an entire film. His pairing with Smith is a good one.
The other star of Wild Wild West is the fantastic look of the film.
Production designer Bo Welch, who also worked on Men in Black and Edward Scissorhands, knows how to make every set ooze with telling detail. From the kinky bedroom of Dr. Loveless to a great saloon scene to the luxurious train and the Jules Verne aesthetic of the futuristic elements, your eyes simply can't get enough of this film. Combined with cinematographer Michael Ballaus excellent execution of both Western frontier grandeur and a couple great visual puns, the mise en scene alone is worth the price of admission.
