Mild Mild `West' -- High-Tech Remake Of The '60S TV Series Has Its Draws But Shoots Mostly Blanks

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XX 1/2 "Wild Wild West," with Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh and Salma Hayek. 152 minutes. Auburn Cinema 17, Bella Bottega, Crossroads, East Valley 13, Everett Mall 1-3, Factoria, Galleria 11, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Kent 6, Meridian 16, Metro, Mountlake 9, Lewis & Clark, Longston 14, Oak Tree, SeaTac Cinemas, Totem Lake, Woodinville 12. Rated PG-13 for action violence, sex references and innuendo. -------------------------------

This is how the "Wild Wild West" was lost. The film goes in with guns blazing (the budget-busting action movie opens today, just in time for Will Smith Weekend: July 4), but it falls short of victory. Even box-office heavies Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh can't save it.

If you're looking for the clever action-fantasy director Barry Sonnenfeld created with "Men in Black," "Wild Wild West" will meet you only halfway.

Rumors had already been circulating about chinks in the movie's armor. According to the buzz, Sonnenfeld had gone way over budget, ringing in at $175 million, and he was forced to reshoot and re-edit after screenings failed miserably with test audiences (he denies it all). And despite the continued success of big-screen remakes of retro TV shows, fans of the '60s TV show "The Wild Wild West" belong to an older age bracket than the standard summer-blockbuster moviegoer.

Set in the post-Civil War era, the TV series revolved around a James Bond-in-chaps hero, James West, his tinkering sidekick and master of disguise, Artemus Gordon, and their battle against the evil Dr. Arliss Loveless.

The movie borrows the series' hokey names and cheesy "Bonanza" music, and styles the opening credits after the original lithographic intro shots. Smith revives the role of Civil War hero West with black hat set at a permanently rakish tilt, and Kline plays the parts of an uptight, mechanically obsessed Gordon, Gordon impersonating President Grant - and Grant himself. (It makes sense in the movie.)

Together, Kline's Gordon and Smith's West have a week to stop Dr. Arliss Loveless, a Confederate veteran (played by a zebra-goateed Branagh) who can't quite get over the fact that the South lost the war - a war that cost him a lung, spleen, legs, reproductive organs and 25 feet of intestine to boot. His body - one of several slightly disturbing special effects - now ends on a plank, and he moves about using a steam-powered wheelchair.

Loveless fiendishly plans to take over the U.S. with his company of half-dressed Nordic saloon girls and a big mechanical tarantula built by kidnapped scientists.

To save the country from the legless Loveless, the good guys have West's sharp-shooting, wise-cracking wits and Gordon's various inventions, from spring-loaded traps to a flying bicycle.

Smith's and Kline's disparate comedic styles sometimes click, sometimes miss. Smith seems overly concerned with playing it cool and once again applies his one-line sitcom delivery to the script. The ever-reliable Kline embraces his dorky outfits and garish prostitute drag with comic maturity.

The two grab several laughs with the physical comedy scenes, such as when they get collared with magnetic post-surgical dog collars and literally can't get away from each other. But during the odd serious moments that demand slightly more, Smith doesn't quite achieve the depth he displayed in his long-forgotten role in "Six Degrees of Separation."

Salma Hayek runs around in her skivvies for most of the movie. It's unclear what her vapid character, Rita Escobar, is supposed to do other than marvel at West's superhero antics. In one scene that seems to have been illogically spliced, it turns out Escobar is secretly in cahoots with Loveless, but then she inexplicably reverts back to damsel in distress.

Most of the fun comes from the special effects on Gordon's gadget-loaded train, the Wanderer, and the 80-foot tarantula. For all its lightness, though, there's a slight edge to this film that's unusual in a Will Smith summer action flick.

Smith adds a Steppin' Fetchit to his routine, he and Loveless lob African-American and disabled jokes at each other, and there's plenty of sexual innuendo to go around, including a scene with Smith and a woman cavorting naked in a water tower. Plenty of butt shots, too, of Hayek and Bai Ling, who plays another tired version of the two-faced Asian seductress, the Miss East to Mr. West.

Loveless' egomaniacal ravings quickly become tiresome, and they go a little over the top. In one scene, he commands a tank to mow down a troop of Confederate soldiers with machine-gun fire. No matter how evil the movie paints him, though, a fight between West and the knee-high Loveless still seems really unfair.

It's just another element that makes this movie an uneven joy ride. It has its ups and downs but never makes it over the big climactic hill. It will probably make buckets of money, but as this summer's action movie, "Wild Wild West" only gets mild.