Toy Soldiers

Although Daniel Petrie Jr., who directed and co-wrote Toy Soldiers (with David Koepp, based on William P. Kennedy's novel), has never before directed a movie, he sure knows how to keep things moving. Even with its faults, Toy Soldiers gets by a lot of the time. [26 Apr 1991, p.12]

Toy Soldiers is a crisp, suspenseful thriller well tailored to the tastes of teen-age audiences, who will doubtless appreciate such touches as the equivalent microchips found in one student's radio-controlled airplane and the chief terrorist's detonator, which is rigged to blow up the entire school.

Toy Soldiers is strictly formula writing, and rather ordinary formula at that, director Daniel Petrie Jr. gets generally good acting from the cast, and the script is guaranteed not to test them too much. [26 Apr 1991, p.3F]

Material like this might have worked if the moviemakers had played it completely crazy and over-the-top, if they'd made it a true satire of the American upper class facing its worst nightmare. But the tone of Toy Soldiers suggests its makers might have tried to turn Animal House into a triumph of the spirit story, too. [26 Apr 1991, p.F10]

It’s Dead Poets Society meets Die Hard. The movie is competent, smoothly photographed, and pretty much free of false, baby-Rambo heroics. It’s so inoffensive that you can almost overlook its central drawback — that the students don’t have much personality.

If your teenage sons are looking for heroes, send them to Toy Soldiers. Even if they're not, send them anyway. They'll probably enjoy watching a judge being thrown out of a helicopter. Too bad the judge didn't take the script with him. Most reasoning adults will probably reject this far-fetched clash between American preppies and Colombian terrorists.

Unfortunately, Petrie's idea of dramatic tension is to expose more boyish flesh as the movie progresses. And as more and more lumpy young pectorals are flashed, more and more people and objects are exploded. All this is accompanied by a persistently obnoxious soundtrack that features patriotic fanfares. And as the four different plots bump into each other like blinded laboratory animals, we begin to feel empathy if not pity for everyone involved.