Film review:

In 1999, Hollywood decided to make the TV-Series noded above into a movie.Barry Sonnenfeld directed, and Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Brannagh and Salma Hayek starred in this production that failed to achieve box office success, but was still watchable.

The basic premise is based on the original TV-series, so I won't go into that. The plot of the movie comes into motion, when American President Ulysses S. Grant (Kevin Kline) sends two of his best agents, James West (Will Smith) and Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline) on a mission to investigate the kidnappings of Americas leading scientists. Meanwhile, Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh) has an ultimatum delivered demanding the surrender of the United States of America to him. And so West and Gordon must find a way to defeat the evil scientist Dr. Loveless and his gadgets and rescue the kidnapped Salma Hayek as well.

Artemus Gordon: We have the element of surprise. What does Loveless have?
(They look down into a canyon)
Artemus Gordon: He has his own city.
Capt. James West: He has an 80-foot tarantula.
Artemus Gordon: I was just coming to that.

But Dr. Arliss Loveless seems not only to be a mad scientist able to conceive the wildest gadgets, but to have also read some of the Evil Overlord list, advising his henchpersons not to shoot Gordon in the heart, as he requests, but in the head instead, or fails to reveal his plot to the captured West. But he didn't read it too well, as he always fails to make sure of the death of his opponents. Well, they all must fail somewhere, I guess. His weird science gadgets are quite neat, like the magnetic guillotine, or his mechanical wheelchair, giving us a hint of Steampunk-Western adventure...

The movie itself is lacking good scriptwriting, about half the jokes fail to deliver, and most characters, excepting Brannagh's Loveless remain rather bland. The Smith/Sonnenfeld dream team of Men in Black fails in this effort. Some of the visuals are spectacular, especially the mechanical spider, but SFX alone have never saved a movie. And so it remains a movie with great potential, which is wasted by sub-standard scripting. When watching it, I also felt that there must have been some severe cuts in the editing. But hey, I good some neat ideas for my next Deadlands: Weird West game...

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