Small Soldiers

#10 in my ranking of Joe Dante’s filmography.

Joe Dante’s previous film, Matinee, bombed horribly at the box office, and he struggled to get his next assignment off the ground, having the submit to studio demands more fully than before, leading to this compromised production that has some of the Joe Dante flair. However, the script ends up reminding me of those limp, aimless things that John Sayles wrote near the beginning of Dante’s career, Piranha and The Howling, filled with people kind of waiting around until the third act starts. It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, which doesn’t help things when it’s simply not as fun as it should be.

GloboTech, a conglomerate that owns a wide range of product lines including munitions, has purchased the small toy company Heartland Toys, CEO Gil Mars (Denis Leary) telling the two designers Larry (Jay Mohr) and Irwin (David Cross) to create a toy that can actually do what it does in the commercials. They create the Gorgonites and the Commando Elite, monsters and military toys that are designed to be in conflict with each other, Larry using the newfound access to GloboTech’s resources to find the X1000 chip to power the toys.

You know, for a Gremlins ripoff, that’s a lot of business to get us to the point where toys do chaos. The charm of a man finding a curious creature in an out of the way shop is replaced by corporate governance and politics, toy design, and a very curious internal inventory system that gives toy designers access to experimental military hardware. It seems like the kind of rewrite stuff to expand smaller roles for comedic actors who have been cast. It would help if Leary and Cross were actually funny in the roles, but they just don’t have a whole lot of room to maneuver in their limited screentimes, especially near the beginning.

The actual story starts in the small town of Winslow Corners, Ohio, Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith) is new to town and helps his father, Stuart (Kevin Dunn) run his toy shop that refuses to sell war toys. He has a thing for his next door neighbor Christy (Kirsten Dunst). The delivery driver Joe (Dick Miller) decides to let him take all of these new Gorgonite and Commando Elite and hand them off to Alan, a child, who promises that he’ll get them all sold before the end of the weekend before Stuart comes back from a business trip. I mean, sure.

I suppose the most interesting thing in the film is how the toys get into a chain reaction that leads to their self-awareness and increasing danger. That’s obviously the kind of thing that would have attracted Dante to the project, including all of the practical effects, and it’s where the film is the most fun, bringing Dante’s horror movie inspiration back to the forefront.

The problem is that Alan doesn’t have a whole lot to do through most of it. He wakes up the leader of the Commando Elite, Major Chip Hazard (Tommy Lee Jones) who tries to kill Archer (Frank Langella), the leader of the Gorgonites. Alan takes Archer home, and he…just stays home for the next forty minutes or so. In the meantime, Hazard wakes up the rest of the Commando Elite and the Gorgonites wakes up for…reasons, and the Gorgonites end up hiding until Alan comes around to find them. Then they hang out while the Gorgonites decide that their home world is somewhere out there, all while the Commando Elite get ready for battle, up to and including taking Christy’s Barbie knock off toys and turning them into soldiers.

The joys of the film are in these individual moments, like the girl dolls saying girl doll things while committing violence with deformed heads from the electricity process that melts their faces slightly, or the entirety of Phil Hartman’s performance as Christy’s dad Phil. The chaos of the finale, with the Commando Elite firing improvised weapons into the house while the Gorgonites learn to fight back against their programming instead of just giving up and losing as they’re supposed to.

The chaos has its charms, but it’s completely unmoored from anything that came before it. The actual story of Alan trying to make his way into Christy’s heart is half-formed, at best, and largely uninteresting. The plot of Alan trying to lead his parents to believe that he’s responsible just gets forgotten. The rest of the cast are around for comic effect, and they have their moments, but they’re really no more than moments.

And the end result, despite fun moments, is a largely disconnected film without much of a point and only limited bits of amusement. It both feels like a movie with too many cooks as well as a return to Dante relying on collaborators who couldn’t work as well as what he had been using through the 80s and early 90s.

Rating: 2/4