Brisco County, Jr. died so that this might live.
posted by pwnguin at 7:26 PM on March 17 [7 favorites]

I tried re-watching this a couple of years back after finishing up the '60's TV version (better than I expected, honestly), and mildly inspired by Neil Cicierega's Wow Wow, and... Yeah, no, whuf. I didn't remember thinking it was that bad when I watched it on home video back in the early aughts, but I think I ended up bailing out after half an hour in the 2020's. And it had so much going for it! Peak era Will Smith! Kevin Kline! Salma Hayek! Kenneth Branagh! And yet it was such a stinker, yech. I mean, I'm usually pretty easy to please for dumb popcorn movies, but this really didn't hold up at all.
posted by Kyol at 7:29 PM on March 17 [3 favorites]

For posterity, here's (part 2 of) a younger, chubbier Kevin Smith talking about pitching his script for Superman Lives to future Wild Wild West executive producer Jon Peters, who insisted on including a giant spider "Thanagarian Snarebeast" in that movie too before Tim Burton took control. (The punch line is in the last 60 seconds if you're impatient.)
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:51 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]

Yeah, this is a movie that is aggressively worse than the sum of its parts.

Few of the "let's make a feature-length film based on an old television program" projects from this era were brilliant but it didn't have to be this bad and in the right hands might even have found an audience.

The original program was a bit odd but certainly offered possibilities for an adaptation to have fun with, pretty much none of which were realized in the final product,.
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:57 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I'll gladly rewatch The Saint or Mission Impossible - even if nothing else they were fun. But trying to do an introduction to West and Gordon where they're anything but the buddies in a buddy cop movie (which the show was, if memory serves. Or at least they were professional to each other, unlike the movie where it felt like West thought Gordon was an eccentric idiot at best), I don't know what they were thinking. Probably that Will Smith's charisma would carry it, I assume.
posted by Kyol at 8:18 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]

I have never figured out why this movie is so disliked.

Is it a career highlight for anyone involved? No, not really
Does it sometimes sag under its own weight? Yah, a bit.

But it's got banter, giant steampunk spiders, cheesy over-acting, Salma Hayek, catchy theme song (admittedly no MIB).

What more do you want in a summer movie?

But, you know, it has been 20 years since I've seen it, maybe I've forgotten how bad it really is!
posted by madajb at 10:49 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]

My money is on "you've forgotten how bad it really is."

Done differently, the scenery-chewing and over-the-top ridiculousness could possibly have been fun, maybe in a "it's so bad it's good" sort of way. Alas, that is really not what happened.
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:17 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]

It's a stupid movie and casually transphobic, but it was entertaining. Kevin Kline absolves a lot of sins.
posted by porpoise at 11:24 PM on March 17

I remember really liking it as a kid. I haven't watched it in a long time, but I could put together a decent scene by scene reconstruction because I had watched it enough. The lip-reading accented lady pops into my head a few times, US Marshals, US Army idk why it stuck with me. That and the line reading Smith does "That . . . is a man's . . . head". Oh, and Branagh's speech about how he lost six feet of large intestine in that amazing accent. The scene where Klein's character is pretending to be the President is fun, the magnet in the cornfield at least made me laugh when I was younger, though now of course it's quite ridiculous. Also just how silly it is that he sees the man in the painting start to aim at him in the reflection of Bai Ling's eye. I guess I get why it doesn't work, and I don't really want to go back and rewatch it because I had such a fond memory of it. Oh, and this is not how you transport nitro. For whatever reason the movie is very quotable in my own head space, idk.
posted by Carillon at 11:56 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]

I remember a lot of complaints from the Overly Online Dudebros at the time about the historical accuracy of Will Smith's casting, and a whole lot of people sniping back and forth about whether there were African-American soldiers/Marshalls/Cowboys/etc.

I tried pointing out a couple times that "whatever the 'historical accuracy' might be about African Americans in the west - I'm pretty sure that there weren't any giant mechanical spiders either, so why aren't y'all arguing about that too?"

....No one could satisfactorily explain that to me. Funny that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:26 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

In addition to Superman Lives, Jon Peters also reportedly tried to shoehorn a giant mechanical spider into a script for The Sandman. He's consistent!

Side note: Jon Peters is also, by all accounts, a terrible person.
posted by AndrewInDC at 6:43 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

Brisco County, Jr. died so that this might live.

Brisco County, Jr. — what a great show! Jack of All Trades was also great in its own way. "I was going to knock, but my first had other ideas!" is one of my favorite Bruce Campbell lines. I've noticed that Wild Wild West (1999) is one of those movies that a thrift store or flea market always has a copy of, which I've learned is a bad sign. Two other DVDs that always make an appearance are Bewitched (2005) and Paycheck (2003), two of the worst movies I have ever seen.
posted by jabah at 6:46 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

I saw this movie a few times back in the aughts. I feel like it was a recurring option on TBS or HBO or something that might be playing on a weekend while I was multi-tasking. When it popped up on Tubi, I decided to give it a go.

Something about an absolutely insane, racist, misogynistic moron who wants to seize power and completely destroy a country seemed not entirely irrelevant, and being able to laugh at that felt good. Parts of it are quite painful to see on rewatch, but I did appreciate the campiness and the abundance of puns - or the punbundance, if you will.

I also realized for the first time that there's a neat little visual reference to E.T. when Kline and Smith set off in the flying machine.

Some quotes I appreciated, lifted from IMDB:

President Grant: And you, West, not every situation calls for your patented approach of "shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more and then when everybody's dead try to ask a question or two."

Artemus Gordon: Oh, look. My auxiliary tool kit, I forgot all about it. It must have fallen out of my pocket.
Capt. James West: Your pocket? Why wasn't it on some spring-loaded contraption that shoots out your ass?
Artemus Gordon: That's the first place Loveless would have looked.

Coleman: President thought you boys could use a little looking-after. But I draw the line at defying gravity, so good luck.


Capt. James West: That's it, no more Mr. Knife guy.

Dr. Arliss Loveless: The wrongs will be righted! The past made present! The United - divided!

[as West pretends to be an exotic dancer to distract Dr. Loveless and free the hostages]
Capt. James West: Have you out of here in just a second, Mr. President.
[West jumps into Dr. Loveless' wheelchair and is wheeled away]
President Grant: Is she with us?
Coleman: Captain West, sir.
Rita Escobar: Oh, he's so graceful.
posted by bunderful at 6:59 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

I shut it off after about 20-30 minutes, even knowing about its dire reputation and expecting nothing more than an intermittently-engaging shlockfest. I wasn't particularly into the original TV show, which I'm just old enough to remember watching during its original broadcast, but I have to admire its panache in inventing, or at least presaging, the whole steampunk genre decades early. It was very much its own thing.

This thing, on the other hand, seems to be trying to be a number of things, none of them particularly well: another successful film franchise for Barry Sonnenfeld after Men in Black, another successful theme song for Will Smith, and, I guess, Jon Peters getting his giant mechanical spider. At least he got that; I actually like the song, and it was a big hit, but the video (which has more energy in a few minutes than I saw in the beginning of the film) screeches to a halt a couple of minutes in because... because... because Smith wanted to make a big entrance, I guess? Completely kills the momentum of the song. (I like this version much better.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:07 AM on March 18

The Kevin Smith quote "You want me to write a scene where Brainiac is razzling polar bears?" lives constantly rent free in my head. I've watched that talk so many times in the era of the MCU and DCEU as an example of where we could have been instead.
posted by Molesome at 8:15 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

Not only could we have gotten Brainiac wrestling polar bears, but gay R2-D2 as well. What If?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:13 AM on March 18

I think I watched this in a theatre. I recall little more than a radiant Salma Hayek (she's purty). Now that you mention it, there was a big spider!

If you haven't heard Barry Sonnenfeld talk I recommend seeking out interviews. He's much more entertaining than this film.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:18 PM on March 18

I'm glad it happened, because it furnished hip-hop with one of its greatest lines:

Yo my last check for Wild Wild West came on a flat bed
posted by Lemkin at 6:23 PM on March 18

Great movie? No. Is it a hot mess? Absolutely. Do I find it entertaining? You bet yer sweet bippy I do. It’s mindless and cool looking and while Will Smith is the headliner, Kevin Kline is simply and absolutely fun and he drives the movie.
posted by azpenguin at 10:24 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]

With the greatest respect to Ebert, but Kevin Kline didn't have facial hair in Dave and that was a fun movie. Ahem.

This was definitely supposed to be the next big tentpole for Smith after MiB, up to and including its own song and dance that went along with it. Parts of the film are fun, most of it inoffensive, and in the end, it keeps its head above the waters of being terrible. I remember my biggest irritant with the film, a film with a giant steam powered mechanical spider, was it showed the US Capitol building still under construction when it had been completed in 1865 or so. C'MON HOLLYWOOD.

I don't own a copy, but if someone said, you want a copy for $2? I'd probably take it.
posted by Atreides at 7:41 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

this movie is great.

there are lots of things wrong with it.

still, it's great.

[To my mind it's not unlike a painting by Hieronymus Bosch; there's a lot going on, some of it is disgusting, offensive, irreligious, insane, drug-addled etc., and yet it is a broad canvas, intricately painted and endlessly rewarding.]
posted by chavenet at 11:02 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

Brisco County, Jr. died so that this might live.

That sounds great too, and you can watch it here. I had never heard of this!
posted by chavenet at 11:06 AM on March 19

I actually think Brisco County just got beat out by the show that premiered that same year and aired after it each night - some show about 2 FBI agents looking for aliens or something. :-)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:09 PM on March 19

Having re-watched all of Brisco recently, I'd say it holds up but you reeeeally have to keep reminding yourself that this was made for the early 1990s. Also Fox was so convinced it was going to be their next (arguably second ever?) ratings smash (a mantle that, as pointed out above, would accidentally be taken up by The X-Files) that they green-lit 27 (!!) episodes for the first season before the pilot had even aired, so there are definitely some clunkers.
posted by AndrewInDC at 7:14 AM on March 20