What happens when you combine action figures with the latest in military software?
Directed by Joe Dante, on the surface Small Soldiers feels like it could be something more subversive and anarchic - a companion piece to Dante’s Gremlins duology, The ‘Burbs et al.
The final film is a weird beast - parts of it feel like a Verhoeven-style satire of the way militarism has infiltrated American society, other parts feel like a kids movie about learning valuable life lessons.
Because of the gulf between these dueling tones, the movie is slightly bland.
It is entertaining, and the all-star cast of toys (played by Tommy Lee Jones, the surviving members of the Dirty Dozen and Spinal Tap) steal the show.
But the parody of war and military cliches is mostly toothless and the protagonist’s arc does not pack emotional punch.
Gregory Smith feels miscast as Alan Abernathy - I do not blame the actor but the character feels undefined. We are told he has been ejected from two schools for vague reasons, and his dad does not trust him - except he also helps run his dad’s store and only shows his own initiative.
At the end of the movie, his dad finally trusts him, but it gets a little lost.
Part of Small Soldier’s blunted effect may also be computer generated. This was Dante’s first work with the technology, and so it loses some of the visceral tactility of Gremlins.
The effects have aged but they are helped by the fact that the characters they are used to create are made of plastic, plus this is early enough in the technology that there is a focus on integrating them with puppetry.
A few scenes suffer from the sheer number of animated characters on screen. When there are a few toys, it iworks but during the third act when there are dozens of toys bounding around it starts to feel like the battle scene at the end of The Phantom Menace.
The movie ends on an appropriately cynical note - the company covers up the incident and is looking forward to selling the toys to the military - but this attempt at satire gets muffled by the sincerity of Alan’s storyline.
Maybe Dante cannot reach that kind of sincerity, or the demands of a big budget meant the movie lost its bite. Whatever the reason, this movie feels like a pulled punch.
Small Soldiers is still fun. But the shadow of something more anarchic and funny is always present.
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