On 14 September 2024, I saw at a local market the intriguing 8-inch-tall vintage Hasbro action figure pictured at the end of this present review, a vaguely leonine character with an arrow quiver slung across his back. I learnt from the seller that he was from the late 1990s sci fi/comedy movie Small Soldiers, which I own on DVD but had never watched. So I bought the figure for £1 and the following evening I watched the movie. Let's just say that I much preferred the figure!
Directed by Joe Dante, and released in 1998 by DreamWorks Pictures in North America and Universal Pictures internationally, Small Soldiers has as its title characters a set of toys that have been rendered self-aware and with the ability to learn but also weaponised for serious battle-fighting, due to their having been inadvertently implanted with a top-grade, top-secret microprocessor intended for use in the USA's military defence programs!
Through faintly nefarious means, albeit for a good cause (to sell them at his father's ailing toy shop and thus bring in some much-needed cash), a complete set of both toy factions – the gung-ho Commando Elite soldiers, who are programmed specifically to win; and their alien but peaceful, non-aggressive foes the Gorgonites, who are programmed always to lose (with my newly-purchased action figure proving to be the lead Gorgonite character, an emissary named Archer) – come into the hands of teenager Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith).
But it all soon gets totally out of hand, when the Commnado Elite soldiers declare full-scale war upon the Gorgonites, as well as upon any humans who try to stop them. Moreover, despite their small stature, these terrifying toy soldiers soon prove exceedingly adept at utilising full-sized – and potentially death-dealing – equipment to achieve their ends!
Alan's family and their next-door neighbours the Fimples, who include Alan's high-school love interest Christy (Kirsten Dunst), swiftly find this out to their cost, once Alan and Christy attempt to protect the hapless, helpless Gorgonites from the Commando Elite's merciless, sustained, and seemingly unstoppable onslaught.
And this is when and why it all became rather tedious for me. I'm not a war movie fan at the best of times, and the ongoing, ever more violent battles between the besieging toy soldiers and the besieged humans (and Gorgonites) holed up inside their homes seemed interminable during this movie's second half after an equally drawn-out setting of the stage for these battles in the first half. Put another way, it didn't take very long for my boredom threshold to be reached!
Having said that, I enjoyed watching how the neat twist of the ostensible heroes of this movie's toy contingent turning out to be the villains and its supposed villains proving to be the heroes played out. Certainly, the Commando Elite soldiers are thoroughly obnoxious, and become ever more so as the movie progresses, with no redeeming characteristics at all, whereas the Gorgonites, although much more sympathetic, are not given enough screen time, so the viewer finds it difficult (or at least I did) to bond with or root for them.
Happily, however, the bad guys did ultimately get their comeuppance, the good guys survived to set forth on an inevitably small-sized but scenic voyage of discovery here on planet Earth in search of their own world, and I added an interesting new movie action figure to my collection, so everything ended well.
It's just that I feel certain that Small Soldiers could have worked so much more effectively had it been a tight 45-minute featurette rather than a stretched-out 90-minute feature.
Finally, I can't bring this review to a close without mentioning that the voice cast for the toys (brought to life on screen via a combination of puppetry and CGI) was nothing if not eclectic. For it utilised not only Tommy Lee Jones but also actors from the 1967 American war movie The Dirty Dozen (including Ernest Borgnine and George Kennedy) for the Commando Elite soldiers, and cast members from the 1984 spoof rock movie This is Spinal Tap for most of the Gorgonites (but with Frank Langella as Archer), plus Sarah Michelle Geller of Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV fame and Christina Ricci from The Addams Family movies for some weaponised dolls! I told you that it was eclectic!
If you'd like to watch an official Small Soldiers trailer on YouTube, please click here to do so.
And to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE; also, please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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