Small Soldiers

(Man, I've seen a lot of movies lately. And Disturbing Behavior, Zorro and Saving Private Ryan are on the agenda for the weekend)

File this one under Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda. They shoulda developed the human characters a little more (always a problem with movies involving F/X creations), they coulda had a great movie and they woulda made a lot of money. As it is, Small Soldiers has a great meanness to it, but it wound up missing the mark by just enough to keep it from being wholly involving. But it still has some wonderfully nasty moments.

Director Joe Dante has been trying to recapture the magic of his 1984 movie Gremlins since he made it. And this is pretty close. The idea was a good one. Defense company Globotech, headed by a man named Mars (a dead on Denis Leary), decides to go corporate to keep profits up by buying out a toy manufacturer, what with defense spending not as high as it used to be. The two programmer/developers who weren't laid off in the acquisition (insert subtle slam on corporate life in the '90s here) are assigned to make toys that play back with kids. This would have been out of the question before the merger, but now that these programmers have the defense company's hardware at their fingertips, they get cracking, using the two new lines of toys they just created: The peaceful Gorgonites and the war hungry Commando Elite.

The eager beaver kissass programmer (the seemingly ubiquitous Jay Mohr), while searching through Globotech's library of computer chips, uses a military chip to run the Gorgonites and Commandos. That's where the problem starts. These chips don't just contain artificial intelligence, they use actual intelligence, which means they can learn, and quickly. The first shipment of Gorgonites and Commandos lands at a small toy store in Ohio, where Alan (Gregory Smith, who looks a lot like Elijah Wood to me), a hard luck teenager running the store while his dad's at a seminar, asks the truck driver with the toys if he can take a set and give him the money once he sells them. The driver reluctantly agrees, and almost immediately the girl next door (the fetching Kirsten Dunst, who's well on her way to becoming Babe Extraordinaire) brings in her little brother, who spots the Commandos and begins begging for them. Alan thinks he's all set. The Commandos, however, have other things in mind.

It was a novel idea to bring in members of the original Dirty Dozen to voice the Commandos (Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, George Hamilton, et al), and Tommy Lee Jones was a good cast as their leader Chip Hazard. What would have helped me enjoy the movie more is if the Commandos had acted more, well, human. These things are Terminators, they stop at nothing to squash the Gorgonites (They can't help it, they were programmed that way, just as the Gorgonites are programmed to lose). Anyone who even looks at a Gorgonite sideways is immediately branded the enemy and will suffer their wrath, be it by nail gun or flaming tennis balls (a very ingenious bunch, these Commandos). It was a nice idea to make what seemed in the ads like the good guys, actually be the bad guys. But something is missing. Perhaps they should have been a more sympathetic bunch, I'm really not sure. The Commandos did one thing, though, that had me howling. They used a very overexposed pop band as a form of psychological torture. Clever.

The human actors did fine in their supporting roles, and they were all in supporting roles. Denis Leary seemed inches away from saying "I think you hear me knocking, and I think I'm coming in, and I'm bringing a bunch of badass Commando soldiers with me, o-KAY?!?!" and that was perfect. The late, great Phil Hartman was a cartoonish technonerd boor next door (and Dunst's character's father), and thank God they took out the line from the trailer where he says "I think I'm having an aneurysm." Sarah Michelle Gellar and Christina Ricci lend their voices to the Commando recruits, and the cast of Spinal Tap all play the lovable Gorgonites.

The dialogue was surprisingly snappy, yet I'm so tired of hearing sixteen year old kids saying "Hey, you like Led Zeppelin?" "Yeah, they're my favorite band!" Get with the program, screenwriters of America. To these kids, The Smiths are old school, and Zeppelin is a dinosaur band. Try to catch up with pop music, all right? And the last scene of the movie should have a "Kids: No Not Try This At Home!!" message running across the bottom, because Alan pulls off something that no one in their right minds would do.

All in all, I had fun, but I think it could have been a classic. I wanted to waste the Commandos from the second they popped up, and that is not the hallmark of a good villain. Admit it, we rooted for the Terminator in some points. But these guys had no redeeming qualities. And that made the ending a little less climactic as a result.