Okay, here's the deal. It's time for a little romp down memory lane, folks. Jump in Mr. Peabody's WayBack Machine and come with me. We're going to summers past, through the cocoa butter and the cut-offs, through the long lines at amusement parks and family car trips, back to the summer of 1984. Anybody remember that summer? Bet not, in terms of anything overly important. The Olympics were in L.A., nobody really knew what El Niño was, and Reagan was riding the re-election trail.
I remember it, though, due to the movies that opened that summer. There was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the rollercoaster of the three Indy movies. Hearts getting torn out, Indy slapped a little kid, and Spielberg fell for his female lead. There was Ghostbusters, one of the funniest movies of the '80s. Bill Murray cheating on an ESP test so a hot blonde would win. Dan Aykroyd's cigarette dangling from his lip as he sees the ghost in the hotel. Rick Moranis inviting Sigourney Weaver to "play some Twister and do some breakdancing." We also got Top Secret, one of the unsung funny movies of all time from the team of Zucker/Zucker/Abrahams. Val Kilmer doing Elvis, a whole scene filmed in reverse, and a fight scene filmed underwater, complete with cowboy hats, guns, and a saloon girl.
And then there's Gremlins. The absolutely adorable Mogwai critters that, when fed after midnight and soaked in water, multiplied into demonic little scaly monsters that like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and murdering innocent bystanders. These little creatures take over a small town, and managed to outrage the world so bad they helped invent a new MPAA rating, PG-13. The movie had some great laughs, too. I was the only one that laughed out loud when Phoebe Cates told her story about her daddy dying stuck in the chimney in a Santa suit (c'mon, it was a funny story!) The little boogers jumping out and scaring everyone. Nasty little scenes of melting flesh and death by microwave. Great summer fare, I thought.
Imagine my surprise when I found out they made the same film 14 years later.
And, folks, the new film Small Soldiers, starring Denis Leary, Phil Hartman, Kirsten Dunst, and the voices of Tommy Lee Jones, Christina Ricci, and a slew of others, is just that. The details are different, but for the most part, it's the same flick, just with better technology.
The story, such as it is, goes like this: seems there's this batch of top-secret computer chips, designed for military weaponry. They get implanted in a new line of action figures. And this batch of action figures get loose and activate their prime directive, as coded on those chips. They're to launch war games, using any and all means necessary to win. The figures are in two teams. There's the Gorgonites, a band of mutant creatures that are programmed to hide or submit. And there's the Commando Elite, led by Major Chip Hazard (voiced by Tommy Lee Jones). These guys are the soldiers you used to see in a hundred war movies, each having his own little specialty. In a nice bit of casting, the other Commando Elite dolls are voiced by a reteaming of some of the men from the movie The Dirty Dozen, namely Jim Brown, George Kennedy, Ernest Borgnine, and Clint Walker.
The war breaks out, and there's a town in the middle of everything. In this town, there's a kid named Alan (Gregory Smith). He's a kid stereotype -- misunderstood, parental trouble, la, la, la. He's also got a crush on his neighbor Christy (Kirsten Dunst). They get all involved in the melee, trying to get help, then realizing that it's up to them to save the world from these freaked-out toys.
Sound familiar? It should. Subtract the soldiers and the mutants, add the cute fuzzy bunnies and the lizard-dudes, and you've got Gremlins. It's not surprising at all that Joe Dante directed Small Soldiers. He directed Gremlins, so he knows how to throw a town into uproar with things smaller than a porkchop. The surprising thing is, even with so much water under the bridge, Gremlins seems like such a superior movie. The plastic toys have more personality than the virtually wasted human cast, but none of them gets a chance to shine, despite going to great lengths to show that each one is different. The voice casting is good, and Jones gets some choice moments to be Lee Marvin macho, but it wears thin quickly.
In fact, it all seems to wear thin quickly. The "war" scenes are all done as homage/parody of every war movie you've ever seen, from Apocalypse Now to Patton, with other parodies thrown in from things like Titanic and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We even get a mutant-toy thing going, borrowed, I guess, from Toy Story. It's somewhat funny, though, as it involves a troupe of "Gwendy" (read Barbie) dolls are reprogrammed by the Commando Elite squad to be their traveling band of, uh, shall we say, war groupies?
If watching little dolls lay waste to each other and a town, well, this is the movie for you. These toys have their own company-issue weapons, but they also rig flamethrowers, use nailguns, chain saws, knives, and other assorted tools of destruction. While all this might be neat to see, it, too, just gets stale in short order. Funny thing, though, while humans get attacked, there's no threat to the PG-13 rating in the way of blood or gore, so all the restaurant tie-ins and toy sales will be just fine, thank you. No need to complain, it's all fun violence. Or, as Denis Leary, playing the head of the toy company, says, "Don't call it violence, call it action." You get your kicks, but there's no splatter punchline.
On the whole, this movie can't seem to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. If you're playing it for laughs, and you hire Phil Hartman and Denis Leary, give them a funny script. If you're playing it serious, fine, run it like that Karen Black TV movie with the little Bwana doll that chased her all over the house trying to kill her. If you're doing some weird war movie parody, punch the laughs and give the dolls more to say, work the premise of war movies and keep the spirit of things like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. Don't just pour everything into one big pile and pray that it sorts itself out, 'cause it dang sure won't. And, folks, it dang sure didn't. This is just a pile of stank, and, like that old joke, no matter how deep you dig, you ain't gonna find a new pony for Christmas.
The one saving grace in this whole thing might be the CGI stuff, and the superb puppets by Oscar-winner Stan Winston. The detailing in the Commando Elite and the Gorgonites is great, each little flinch, twitch, and nuance. Just too bad you can't build an entire movie with them, Joe. You had to mix in a double-twisted story. It makes me wonder what this would have been like if it had been just the dolls, like a Pixar film, devoted to these two bands of rogue dolls who don't realize that they're toys, warring it out in some deserted town. It would've been funny to see the old war movie parodies like that instead of blended in to the rest of this jumble. Crank up the sigh machine: Ahhhhh, what could have been.
Put your billfold back in your pocket, people. Small Soldiers is a whole lot of marketing and very little movie. Let it hit Cinemax (probably before Christmas....) and give it a look then. In the meantime, if you wanna see Joe Dante at the top of his game, go find a copy of Gremlins and watch Gizmo battling his lizard brethren. It's a lot better movie, and you get Phoebe Cates to boot. Not a bad trade, if you ask me.
Image copyright Dreamworks Pictures.
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under the knife