Gremlins with actuators and no wit
That pretty sums up Small Soldiers. The trailer looked great, while the movie (as thin as it is) does not amount to a hill of beans.
Story, which took four writers, has to do with foot-tall action figures (translation: dolls for boys) which contain a slightly defective defense industry microprocessor. The CPU allows the dolls, uh, "action figures", to run, jump, talk, and (gasp!) learn. Oooooooooooo, I feel a movie plot hook coming around....
And since the CPU is warlike evil, the soldiers go to town bent on wasting their "enemies", the Gorgonite dolls. And in a typical Hollywood fashion, the Gorgonites are the good guys yet look like a bunch of monsters just to show how they're not stereotyping
So ooooooo, what a stand they're making. The soldiers are led by Chip Hazard, a Duke Nuke 'Em clone whose troops are testosterone pumped whitey caricatures of Mr. T. (Oh, there is a token black doll. Excuse me.)
While movie impossibilities are easy to ignore if you like the movie, (sounds in space during Star Wars' battles), the whole it-just-can't-be-done aspect of the dolls is overwhelming. The movie makes a big deal over the microprocessor. So what? How about the servos and actuators it would take to articulate ever finger of the dolls' hands? How are they able to keep their balance? How can they process visual inputs? How can they do all this for $79.95 retail? One doll is damaged and somehow (typical gaping movie plot whole) its procressor is utilized to miraculously make a whole battalion of Barbie-clone dolls walk, talk, attack. No other processors, no mechanicals, yet there's the Barbie Army. Uh-huh. Sure. How convenient.
And Small Soldiers is just not that funny. There's the Patton takeoff and here comes the Apocalypse Now sequence, and then whatever. The dialogue is basically lifted from any war flick which came out in the last 15 years. Their attempt at humor by transplanting dialogue falls flatter than Madonna's box office drawing power.
The adult characters are written as the typical fumbling boobs while the savvy children save the day, so wasn't that an unusual twist? The writers truly went out on a limb there, so look out Hemingway.
Plus Small Soldiers is just so demented in how it handles the action. The toys attack children. They arm themselves with chainsaws, knives, shears nail guns. And they maliciously use them.
As my blurb implies, Small Soldiers is a retread of Gremlins which shows the sad state of affairs for mainstream American movies. Someone just did a name replacement from the older Dante movie to this fiasco. And for all the undeserved carping there has been at Armageddon for its lack of character development, these "critics" need to waddle to the nearest Cineplex and suffer thru Small Soldiers. The parents are tissue-thin stereotypes and the children are only a couple of millimeters thicker. It's truly a waste of time.
Some way cool CGI, but that does not a movie make.
Movie's suitability for: