Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This time we’re headed to Wild Wild West, nominee for eight Razzies, winner of five, bonfire for staggering amounts of money, and testament to the staying power of Will Smith in that he started getting Oscar nominations not long after its release.
Sometimes you can see why they thought it was a good idea.
The year was 1999. Thanks to a minor streak of successful titles like Unforgiven and Tombstone, the Western was experiencing a minor revival. True, no one had attempted a summer blockbuster Western yet, but Warner Brothers apparently saw that writing on the wall as early as 1992, when they optioned the rights to Michael Garrison’s hit ‘60s sci-fi Western TV show, The Wild Wild West.
Not pictured: the giant spider that I’m sure was the third-billed performer.
In the original plan for the movie, Richard Donner, who had also directed three episodes of the show, would direct, Shane Black would write, and Mel Gibson would star as secret agent Captain James T. West. Donner and Gibson both abandoned the project to work on a different Western – 1994’s Maverick – and Tom Cruise stepped into the hole left by Gibson. Before long, Cruise, too, had left for the greener pastures of Mission: Impossible. But the studio very much wanted Wild Wild West to happen, and in 1997, they got their big break. Up-and-coming star director Barry Sonnenfeld was a big fan of the original show, and when he signed on to direct, he got a friend to come along: his Men in Black collaborator Willard Smith.
He walked so Lil Nas X could run.
These days, of course, Will Smith is a Serious Acclaimed Dramatic Actor who wins Oscars and wrecks his future prospects through embarrassing behavior rather than embarrassing box office returns. At the close of the ‘90s, however, Will Smith was one of the most bankable action stars in Hollywood. In the length of a single presidential administration, he had packed in Bad Boys (1995) Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997), and Enemy of the State (1998). And in 1999, he was looking to round out the decade in a big way, because he had just been offered the lead role in an exciting, big-budget science fiction action epic with groundbreaking visual effects and a visionary creative team. I am, of course, talking about The Matrix, in which Smith was offered the lead role of Thomas Anderson/Neo. But Smith turned that role down, because he had his sights set on Wild Wild West. He wanted to work with Sonnenfeld again, and the suave-but-goofy Jim West seemed tailor-made for him. In fact, Smith was not only to star, but was to write and record the theme song.
After George Clooney briefly came and went, Kevin Kline joined up to play the other lead role, West’s partner Artemus Gordon. Warner Brothers, nearly orgasmic at the thought of how much money this was going to make, spared no expense to make the damn thing happen. Michael Ballhaus came on as director of photography. Elmer “Magnificent Seven” Bernstein signed on for the score. Industrial Light & Magic were contracted for the special effects.
Well, if you were surprised by the giant spider, it was your own fault.
So they had a knockout cast, a humongous budget, a top-of-the-line effects team, and a director with a proven sci-fi comedy track record who was also known for inventive visuals. What could go wrong?
What couldn’t go wrong?
If you want the whole must-be-seen-to-be-believed story, read this article from Mel magazine, but here’s the short version. Smith, you see, was the star of the upcoming Wild Wild West in name only. To locate the real star, we have to go behind the camera and meet producer Jon Peters. Peters is a former head of Sony Entertainment, a man of big ideas, and a giant mechanical spider enthusiast.
Peters began his Hollywood career as a hairdresser and wigmaker before becoming Barbra Streisand’s kept man for ten years. His first production credit was on the 1976 Streisand vehicle A Star is Born. He strong-armed his way up the Hollywood production ladder until he became the head of Sony Pictures in 1989 and a bigshot at Warner Brothers in 1994. Among directors, Peters is known for two things: aggressively insisting on his way of doing things, and “his way of doing things” including giant out-of-place mechanical monsters. He famously fell out with Kevin Smith over a planned Superman adaptation because he insisted that Superman 1) not fly, 2) not wear the Superman costume, and 3) fight a giant robot spider at the end of the movie. As you can see from the picture above, Wild Wild West is infamous for containing, among other things, a giant robot spider.
Which, hilariously, Peters claims was not his idea.
Peters’s demands and the continual rewrites on a script that would eventually have six credited writers ensured that production dragged on and the cost ballooned out of control. On one occasion, a “controlled” blaze got out of hand and burned an entire movie set ranch to the ground. The film remains one of the most expensive ever made, adjusted for inflation, but its creators didn’t lose hope until their hope was thrown cruelly back in their face.
When Wild Wild West finally hit theaters, seven years after its conception, audiences and critics dumped it on the street to starve. Fans of the original show hated it for screwing up the relationship between West and Gordon. Non-fans of the original show hated it for being goofy overwritten nonsense, not at all what they’d come to expect from a Will Smith picture. The Razzies quickly jumped on the hate train, and in an especially stinging rebuke, none other than Robert Conrad – the original James West – went to the 2000 Razzie ceremony to collect the film’s “awards.” Today, it’s mostly remembered as a complete dud, not even a good-bad experience. It was a minor blip for its stars, but Peters and Sonnenfeld both found themselves picking up the pieces of wrecked careers for the next decade and a half. It has also gotten considerable side-eye from film nerds because Warner Brothers spent almost their entire advertising budget on its marketing, leaving nothing left over for Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, the darling of critics and animation nerds that also flopped at the box office.
So after all that, did we get Wild Wild West wrong?
THE STORY
Now that’s more like it! Hell yes, we got Wild Wild West wrong. I don’t know what y’all’s problem was back in 1999. No one should have spent $170 million on it, but this movie is one hell of a good time, and the nerds, as usual, need to relax.
The year is 1869. Captain James West (Smith) and U.S. Marshal Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline) cross paths as they hunt for former Confederate General “Bloodbath” McGrath (Ted Levine), who is said to have masterminded a massacre in the town of New Liberty that killed West’s parents. President Ulysses S. Grant (also Kevin Kline, for no particular reason) tasks the two men with tracking down several missing top scientists, whom he believes to be part of a new villainous plot by McGrath.
How every great partnership begins.
Aboard a very fancy train with conductor Coleman (M. Emmet Walsh), West and Gordon find clues that point them towards Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh, whose Southern accent rivals Dick Van Dyke’s Mary Poppins Cockney for sheer linguistic hilarity), a legless ex-Confederate engineering mad scientist. They infiltrate a party at Loveless’s plantation and meet up with an “entertainer” named Rita Escobar (Salma Hayek) who claims to be the daughter of one of the missing scientists. She’s actually his wife, but West and Gordon can’t know that, because it might get in the way of their relentless joint sexual pursuit of her.
We soon learn that McGrath was framed and Loveless was actually the mastermind of the New Liberty massacre. Loveless has not forgiven the Confederate Army for surrendering at Appomattox, and his new dastardly plan is to restart the Civil War by capturing President Grant at the golden spike ceremony for a new railroad. To stop him, West and Gordon must track Loveless to his secret compound in Spider Canyon, where the ultimate battle for the fate of the United States will take place inside an enormous mechanical spider. If you are American and that doesn’t just fill your heart with patriotism, I don’t know what to do with you.
THE BAD
People who have seen the television series have told me that Wild Wild West is an abject failure as an adaptation of The Wild Wild West. Robert Conrad certainly seems to have thought so. I haven’t seen the original show, so I can’t comment. I leave this paragraph here as a placeholder into which fans of the original show can insert their own angry thoughts.
I bet the original show didn’t have any giant steampunk dildos, though.
For a first-time Wild Wild West inductee like me, the movie is at its worst when it temporarily forgets to be a stupid comedy and tries to say something pointed about race relations in the post-Civil War South. 1999 was before Twitter ate the entire world’s brain, so if anyone had nasty things to say about the casting of Will Smith in a role originated by a white actor, most of us thankfully didn’t hear about it. But every so often, the movie decides to showboat hard about this decision, and it never leads us anywhere good. A prolonged sequence in which Jim West narrowly escapes being lynched for making sexually insulting remarks to a woman he believes is Artemus Gordon could have worked as a comedy setpiece if the filmmakers hadn’t been so obviously nervous about their own joke. As it is, it’s deeply uncomfortable and goes on for several minutes past its welcome time. Most of the other scenes that attempt to make any kind of Deal about Jim West being a black man go in the same bucket. You can make racism funny – even vicious, 1870s Louisiana racism – but only if you understand and respect the dynamite you’ve decided to play with.
But at least Wild Wild West makes an attempt to use its comic chops to grapple with racial politics. The same cannot be said for sexual politics: the movie is a criminal waste of Salma Hayek, always an enjoyable presence, but here only because the giant team of writers figured West and Gordon should have a girl to fight over. She makes the most of her time in front of the camera, but you could still take her right out of the movie and suffer no serious consequences.
We would miss out on some great Deborah Lynn Scott dresses, though.
The four leads – Smith, Kline, Hayek, and Branagh – all have more than enough charisma to carry them through the film’s misfires. The same cannot be said of much of the supporting cast. Loveless’s battalion of interchangeable henchladies, being ladies in Wild Wild West, add little to the movie beyond a few boring puns. General “Bloodbath” McGrath is an unnecessarily disgusting screen presence. He turns out to be a pathetic dimwit of a character, but the first act of the movie needs to set him up as a villainous red herring, and does so by giving us as many closeups of his bloodshot mismatched eyes and sweaty porous face as it can during that first act. I did not need or want to watch him expel liquefied earwax from his ear trumpet, and I am angry at Peters or Sonnenfeld or whomever thought I did for putting it in front of me.
Poor Ted Levine truly will never escape the shadow of Buffalo Bill.
Finally, during the climactic showdown, Gordon pulls some offscreen time-manipulation hijinks to build a flying pennyfarthing bicycle from a blueprint left behind by Leonardo da Vinci. I would be able to forgive all of this if the script did not then declare that he and West were calling the creation “Air Gordon.” That’s the sort of joke that loses your entire movie half-stars.
All you had to do was stop talking and not ruin this moment.
THE GOOD
So the script is nonsense, the women are props, and there’s stupid barely-disguised product placement. Welcome to the ‘90s, everybody. Let’s talk about the stuff that actually distinguishes Wild Wild West as a movie now.
I think this is the part where I’m supposed to acknowledge Will Smith’s theme song, which will in fact affix itself to your brain like a musical lamprey if you stick around for the credits. And indeed, compared to the musical offerings of the last few subjects of this column, “Wild Wild West” might as well be “Be Our Guest.” But of all the things I liked about the movie, the theme song is probably at the bottom of the list.
Will Smith, lying back and thinking of platinum records.
I accept – indeed, I confess – that if I had watched Wild Wild West on the tail of Some Like it Hot, A Night at the Opera, Bringing Up Baby, Blazing Saddles, or some other string of wickedly funny, wildly inventive cinematic comedies, it would have paled in comparison and I would have embraced it with far less ardor. But I did not. I watched it after An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Dirty Love, and a few painfully uninspired excuses for summer blockbusters in which everything was lit and painted the color of wet sand. Context shapes our lives. A void of movie-related ennui had encased my heart, and Wild Wild West was there to clear it away at the right time.
I’ll get my spiciest spicy take out of the way first: Wild Wild West is very, very funny. It’s not intellectual, it’s not subversive, it’s not satirical, and it has no ambitions to be great comedic art, but it’s funny, in the sense of “it makes me laugh, frequently and with gusto.” It does this by being unashamedly stupid. Its stupidity isn’t gross or mean-spirited or trying and failing to be smart; it’s a purer form of stupid, like when you laugh at your cat chasing a laser pointer even though you’ve seen it thousands of times. It’s picking the low-hanging fruit because the low-hanging fruit tastes good and you don’t want to expend the extra effort right now.
For example, a running gag in this movie is Artemus Gordon’s drag disguises, which he believes to be very professional and convincing. West is not so convinced, and to prove the point, he demands that Gordon compare his set of fake breasts to West’s own, balloon-like set. Their dialogue is overheard – and clearly misinterpreted as homosexual flirtation – by the eavesdropping Coleman.
If you don’t like the boob jokes, look at Deborah Lynn Scott showing off in the background.
Are these jokes profoundly unoriginal, juvenile, and of course, stupid? Yes. Did I laugh like a stoned hyena? Also yes. I laughed even harder at a scene in which the punchline is Jim West pointing out that the thing in front of him on a table is a man’s head at least five times. Wild Wild West contains a lot of this strand of cheap, lazy humor, and it gets laughs anyway by taking a careful, non-lazy approach to its jokes. It is very funny to watch Will Smith and Kevin Kline discuss the merits of their respective fake breasts with the gravitas appropriate to a community theatre performance of King Lear, and it is even funnier to watch M. Emmet Walsh react to it with old man befuddlement. This is steak-and-potatoes comedy, entirely reliant on centuries-old recipes and tired old-fashioned ingredients, and the thing about steak and potatoes is that it’s tasty.
But maybe you’re not in the mood for steak and potatoes. Okay, then, for you, there’s the spider. The much-maligned spider.
The fifth, rejected Divine Beast from Breath of the Wild.
Look at that thing! Look at this gift, bestowed upon us by moviemakers who love us and want us to be happy! That’s what I call a Transformer, Michael Bay! It’s ridiculous and insane and beautiful and I want to have one in my backyard. Wild Wild West just drops that thing in the middle of a shot and yells “how you gonna quip your way around that, Will Smith!?” When West and Loveless are dangling from the spider’s maw, Smith hanging onto Loveless’s throat by his arms and Loveless simply hanging backwards from his wheelchair like a human gangplank, and Loveless declares (in what is clearly one of Branagh’s favorite lines) “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! How did we arrive at this daaaahhhk situation?” reader, this movie had me exactly where it wanted me.
His jacket buttons are all spiders. Marry me, Deborah Lynn Scott.
And then West replies “I’m just as stumped as you are.” Get it, because Loveless’s legs are stumps! This joke is so stupid, and I laughed so hard, because context, once again, shapes our lives and the movie had me firmly on its side by then.
The breathless lore surrounding Wild Wild West had led me to believe that the spider would feel wildly out of place when it arrived in the film, but the opposite was true: Loveless’s associated spider motif and metallurgy genius had been so well-established in the aesthetic by this point that I think I’d have been disappointed if a giant mechanical spider hadn’t appeared in the film. Whatever decisions they made specifically to accommodate the spider, those were the correct decisions.
Spider aside, though, the entire production design helmed by the legendary Bo Welch is a smorgasbord of lavishness, full of contrasts between the painterly stuck-in-time brick mansions of the Old South and the steely futurism of the Loveless compound. The whole design is a labor of love, but Welch clearly had the most fun designing around Loveless: the character, confined to his cannon-like wheelchair, looks like a human booby trap. Loveless is a rancid, despicable human being, but the movie invests a great deal in making him fun to hate, and fun to watch during his showdowns with Smith and Gordon. All three characters also benefit a great deal from the costuming talents of the great Deborah Lynn Scott, who keeps Smith in particular decked out in a never-ending supply of silk waistcoats and sleek cowboy hats. However many fake apologies Smith has offered for participating in Wild Wild West, I refuse to believe he didn’t make off with a vest or two.
Looking snazzy even in robotic dog cones.
Look, I understand that Wild Wild West rubbed fans (and cast members) of the old TV show the wrong way. When someone is playing with your favorite toy, and you don’t think they’re treating it with respect, I’m not going to fault you for getting mad at them. I will never be able to truly open my heart to New Star Trek for exactly that reason. I, however, have no attachment to The Wild Wild West, and I confess that I cannot imagine reacting to Wild Wild West with anything other than giddy puerile delight. Yes, the jokes are dumb and cliched. They’re also delivered with pinpoint comedic timing. Yes, the plot is incoherent and reeks of drafting by committee. Yes, there’s an enormous mechanical spider tank for no comprehensible reason. Why, may I ask, do you need a comprehensible reason for a giant mechanical spider tank? Where is your sense of adventure? What more does this movie need to give you before you pat its earnest little head and tell it that it did a good job?
In the days since I watched Wild Wild West, I’ve calmed down about it a little bit, including quietly dropping my Letterboxd rating by a full star so that I look less like a crazy person. But I’m still lost on why everyone was so down on it when it came out, and all I can figure is that they punished it for not being the movie they wanted it to be. Fair enough. But I think we’re far enough away from all the baggage everyone gave it that maybe we can learn to accept it for the lovable little thing it is.
Quality of Movie: 3 / 5. It’s a good time, but brainless enough that I’m still stopping a little short of “misunderstood classic” here.
Quality of Experience: 4 / 5. On the other hand, it’s a really good time. How I long for the days when this was a big studio’s misbegotten idea of a summer blockbuster.
You can read Tim’s review of Wild Wild West here!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.