It’s merely an excuse for a truly dazzling fusion of modelwork, matte and CGI, exemplified by the screen-eating tarantula and Branagh’s motorised wheelchair (Loveless, you see, is legless - a seamless digital illusion road-tested by Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump). There’s not much else to say about the story. Our heroes track him down in their customised train, picking up the vengeful beauty Rita (Hayek) along the way, and build to an effects-crazy duel in the Utah desert. Arliss Loveless (Branagh) has developed a vast weapon of mass destruction - the show-stopping mechanical Tarantula - with which he intends to create a Divided States Of America. In the aftermath of the Civil War, snake-hipped government gunslinger James West (Smith) is teamed with boffinly master of disguise Artemus Gordon (a likeable Kline) at the behest of President Ulysses Grant (Kline again, for no good reason other than egomania or budget-capping).
What could possibly go wrong?Įverything, if you believe virtually every critic in America.
WILD WILD WEST TV
Adapted from a spoofy 1960s TV show once described as ‘Maverick meets The Man From UNCLE’ and assured a wham-bam, family-bucket July 4 opening by bankable star Will Smith, it was never going to be anything other than an expensive piece of gadget-driven hokum. Reading anything into Wild Wild West is a bit like seeking the truth in a plate of alphabet spaghetti. Perhaps Barry Sonnenfeld is symbolically destroying Kasdan’s stall, saying, ‘No, this is how you modernise the seemingly moribund cowboy genre, sunshine!’ A sly reference perhaps to writer-director Lawrence Kasdan who, in 1985’s Silverado, attempted to make an old-fashioned Western with new-fangled neuroses. Among the buildings demolished, one shop-sign clearly reads: Kasdan’s Ironmongers. At one particularly explosive stage in this eager-to-please holiday parade, an entire Western town is systematically blown to bits.
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