Wild Wild West is hardly flawless, but it's lots of fun nevertheless. An adaptation of the popular '60s television show of the same name, it's directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, the cinematic brains behind 1997's terrific Men In Black. So there was everything to hope for, and the result, full of some fine comic acting and the sound of delightful special effects with only some minor disappointments.

The scene takes place in 1869, four years after the Civil War, WWW stars Will Smith as the impetuous protagonist James T. West, a federal agent who, in the words of President Ulysses S. Grant, shoots first, second, then some more, and then later only asks questions to all the dead people lying around. His reluctant counterpart is the more cerebral Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline), who prefers artful disguise and the mechanical things he invents rather than West's more rambunctious approach. The cast is rounded out by Kenneth Branagh, who plays the arch-fiend Arliss Loveless, a disabled ex-confederate who's bent on bringing the U.S. government to its knees (partly in revenge for the fact that he no longer has any), and Mexican hot female Salma Hayek as Rita Escobar, the damsel in distress.

WWW is an epic, yet rollicking, tongue-in-cheek nature of the story. The script, by two relative unknowns (Brent Maddock, who wrote that classic, Tremors 2, and Jeffrey Price, who apparently hasn't done anything significant since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), is perfectly serviceable, if not especially distinguished, and the oohs and aahs, as well as the laughs, come at respectably frequent intervals. Sonnenfeld also enjoys tossing in various self-reflexive references to imagery from taken from other icons of pop culture, such as Star Wars, and one shot, in which a dog and an old-fashioned phonograph speaker are briefly juxtaposed to resemble the famous RCA Victor ad "His Master's Voice," had the audience roaring.

Not surprisingly, WWW's a very guy-type movie, full of fistfights, explosions, and neat nineteenth-century technological stuff. Will Smith struts and postures his little heart out, but his comic persona keeps him from being very believable as the ultra-cool West; he seems rather to be playing a character who is pretending to be cool but who's not convincing anyone. Wisely, though, the writers chose to foreground Smith's blackness through a series of quite edgy dialogue exchanges with some unregenerate southern racists, with a lynching rope as a very prominent prop, rather than just make him, more blandly, a James T. West who happens to be black.

Kenneth Branagh is wonderful as Loveless, who, owing to the miracle of modern special effects, is legless as well. He revels in playing the megalomaniac Southern plantation figure; unfortunately, his performance is so over-the-top and yet so strongly convincing that he completely diverts the audience's attention away from Smith when they're in the same room. Kevin Kline is thoughtful and restrained as Gordon and his comic style, seemingly infinitely adaptable, meshes nicely with Smith's. My only regret is that given the centrality of Smith's character, these masterful actors, Kline and Branagh, never get to do any knock-down-drag-out scenes together.