WILD, WILD WEST: Comic fantasy. Starring Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. (PG-13. 105 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

The term "Will Smith action comedy" doesn't quite do "Wild Wild West" justice. Contraption comedy is more like it.

It's the damnedest thing.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld's follow-up to "Men in Black" begins with Will Smith naked in a water tower and Kevin Kline in a brothel in a can-can dress and long red wig. Before it's over, they will have tamed a great galumphing iron erector set of a tarantula and ridden off into the sunset together.

Smith and Kline sounds like a pharmaceutical company, but here they team up for, among many other things, a sly variation on the buddy movie. They're two of the quickest comic actors around, but the ace in the hole in "Wild Wild West" is Shakespearean Kenneth Branagh, who may be the best actor in the movie from the waist up.

That's all that's left of him as the legless villain, Loveless, who whirls about on a steam-powered wheelchair, which is just one of this film's leaps into the surreal.

This $100 million, extravagantly imagined fantasy comes across as something like Sonnenfeld's version of "Brazil." It may not have the mad world view of Terry Gilliam's film, but it's a whole lot funnier.

It's also a buddy movie that uses visual phallic puns to hint wickedly at what might have only crossed the minds of viewers of previous buddy movies, spelling out the ambiguity of their relationship with a funny routine involving an overheard conversation about feeling each other's breasts.

The action is set in 1869. Kline is U.S. Marshal Artemus Gordon, a master not only of disguise but of insane inventions, too. Smith is the Wild West of the title, the trigger- happy Jim West, played by Robert Conrad in the television series, which ran from 1965 to 1970. In this version, West escaped from a pre- Civil War Southern plantation as a child and now works as an Army agent for the government that freed the slaves.

There's a lot of gallows humor in "Wild Wild West." Smith, master of the insolent sneer, is not above going into a mock shuffling routine if necessary before striking like a coiled snake. When West barely survives a lynching attempt, he reminds himself, "Never drum on a white lady's breasts at a redneck dance."


The diminutive villain Loveless of the TV series now has lost the lower half of his body, which makes him literally loveless. He and West trade comic insults that go for the jugular.

Branagh bristles with glinty-eyed fake Southern cheer. Not only is he bitter about the loss of his appendages, but he is also an unreconstructed Southerner who has never forgiven the surrender at Appomattox.

Loveless is not just whistling "Dixie." The villain's steam-powered contraptions escalate, progressing from the wheelchair to an armored vehicle used in a massacre and a steel-plated vessel that looks like either the Monitor or the Merrimac.

The most amazing of all is the 80-foot-tall, eight-legged "tarantula" that springs to life with a great clanking and whirring of gears. This iron contraption has an ungainly, lumbering gait. It creaks and sways as one leg rises and others bend. On top of that, it spits fireballs.

Other surreal touches abound. Gordon is so preoccupied with his own mad-scientist cleverness at one point that it doesn't register with him that he's working with a decapitated head. Gener al "Bloodbath" McGrath (Ted Levine) has a creepy ear trumpet, which results in the best visual pun in the movie. An amazing shootout occurs in a room filled with paintings of gunslingers.


Another good routine involves Smith and Kline linked by ridiculous magnetic collars after they are chased through a field of corn by whirling blades. They take what amounts to a "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" memorial leap into a ravine.

Sonnenfeld never was able to come up with a sequel to "Men in Black." He's set up "Wild Wild West" for one, just in case.

Besides Loveless, there are a couple of other cases of missing parts in "Wild Wild West." Somewhere before this big production hit the theaters, at least one punch line seems to have been snipped off, and there are other dangling parts.

Kline is not the only actor who shows up here in drag. And as in most buddy movies, the women are mostly decorative, but Salma Hayek holds up her end of the bargain.