Small Soldiers(1998)/Dir:Joe Dante, Written by Gavin Scott, Adam Rifkin, T.Elliot and T.Rossio - My first bad Joe Dante film
Finally ! I’ve finished the plaster scrapping of my hallway and I must say, that I’m drenching with sweat from every possible tiny detail that came from that small little renovation job. Of course, it was insufferably boring, and not even Madam Stevie Nicks could help with the tedious boredom while she was singing her heart and lungs out through the ear muffs of my IPod (Well, okay, she did help somewhat, Let’s just say that I Can’t Wait, is a song that help me be more patient.) Until then, I’ve completely finsished the scrapping part, now comes the sanding of the entire hallway which is also boring, tedious and excruciating that is if you’re an intellectual like me. If you’re a man in construction, you’d be doing this unflinchingly, and you wouldn’t bitch, whine and complain like I do. Aftewards on that small chore, I sat down and watched Small Soldiers, which is my first terrible Joe Dante film, even if it means that it was more or less well-directed. And you still know that it’s a Dante film, because it has character actor Dick Miller in it, who is almost in every Joe Dante film, even the obscure Matinee.
It’s terrible in every aspect : the writing is horrendous, the acting is abysmal, the direction is only satisfactory being it’s from Joe Dante, and the man always knows what he’s doing most of the time. While the writing is horrendous, it’s makes the gratuitousness of war, along with making poorly-constructed and under-developped characters. This makes the characters bland and uninteresting in the script, and when you give that sort of script to very good comedic actors like David Cross, Jay Mohr, Dennis Leary or Phil Hartman for that matter, the acting will be nothing more than execrable. Generally if you give actors, a script that is haphazardly written, and to the actors they’ll only have junk to work with, and they might as give you a terrible performance. Even for a kid’s film, the plot could be way too cheesy for the tastes of intelligent kids. It’s really amazingly terrible, but the only thing that could have going for it, is it’s crisp CGI animation for the band of animated toy soldiers called The Commando Elite, and woodland mythical monsters called The Gorgonites, for this Dante film.
The plot seems like another variant of one of his own films, Gremlins, and you do feel the repetition. In Gremlins, goblins who come from a pet, invade a small little family home. In Small Soldiers, toys animated to life by military computer chips invade a small little American family home. It’s the exact same premise in both of the films, the only difference is that they’re both adaptations with different variants to their respective plots. Furthermore, the story is amazingly cheesy and ridiculous. It goes from being a popcorn movie : mindles fun and entertainement, to just plain mindless. A toy company wants to bring toys to life, and to make two set of live toys, called The Gorgonites and The Commando Elite which will try to duke it out on one another, by having them install a military computer chip to make them more alive than inanimate as usual. It’s corporate president,Gil Mars, portrayed by Dennis Leary asks the toy’s creator Larry Benson played rather annoyingly by Jay Mohr, to include the military technology that they have in the toys. And like it is, the two sets of toys are pretty much alive, capable of being sentient. The Gorgonites are peace-loving enchanted creatures, while the Commando Elite are warmongering idiots for alive toy soldiers, who only like destruction for the sake of destruction. Reasonably enough, the little soldiers of the Commado Elite, are very caricatural. A little boy, named Alan, played indifferently by Gregory Smith, with a checkered past of doing school mishaps, gets the toys delivered to the store, while he works for his dad’s toystore, played soberly by Kevin Dunn. Although the casting happens to be more than adequate for the film, a good casting can’t always save a film, and it won’t make it any good.
Actually, the only good coming from this film, is the voice-acting of the toys, with great actors such as Tommy Lee Jones and Frank Langella, who portray Chip Hazard and Archer, respectively. For voice-acting, they know how to give solid performances.
Just really skip on this one. It’s bad and cheesy, and it hasn’t met on any expectations.
1.0*/5
M.L
Nov 27th 2011
