|
| TriStar Pictures | Release Date: April 26, 1991 |
Starring:
Andrew Divoff, Denholm Elliott, George Pérez, Keith Coogan, Louis Gossett Jr., Mason Adams, R. Lee Ermey, Sean Astin, T.E. Russell, Wil Wheaton
Summary:
When terrorists seize control of a boarding school, a group of troublemaking boys decide to resist them.
Watch Now
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
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 hardly deep, but it's diverting and so are most of the actors. First-time director Daniel Petrie Jr. knows his way around this roughhouse terrain -- he wrote Beverly Hills Cop, The Big Easy and Shoot to Kill -- and while he keeps things taut, he has yet to display substance rather than style.
Read full review
At its worst, Toy Soldiers is just an action variation on the old Rooney- Garland musicals - you know, let's-get-a-buncha-kids-together-and-put-on-a-counterinsurgency. At its best, it's surprisingly bearable for a movie so easily typed. [26 Apr 1991, p.4D]
Director Daniel Petrie Jr. does a journeyman job, though he lets the air out of the thing at the end. [26 Apr 1991, p.G5]
Under Petrie's competent direction, the action-genre nuts and bolts are firmly in place. Machine guns are fired and bombs blow up. But the subject of real interest here - how a kid might come to terms with authority even if his boarding school weren't taken over by Colombian terrorists - gets lost in the showdown. [26 Apr 1991, p.24]
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.
Read full review
More From Metacritic
Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
More From Toy Soldiers
