Toys (1992)
Picked by: Sam Why: A clip about modern drone warfare kept resurfacing online, and the source kept turning out to be this 1992 Robin Williams movie. Sam looked it up, saw it was Robin Williams' personal passion project — his would-be Willy Wonka anti-war comedy — and figured it was worth the watch. It was not.
The Conversation
Sam came in with the most generous read of the three, which at a 65 is still not saying much. His hook was the drone warfare prescience — children in a room playing video games to remotely destroy things, the general pitching cheap unmanned weapons to the US military, a throwaway line about the Israelis being very interested in the technology. In 1992. Sam noted that Ender’s Game was published in 1985, so Toys got there first even on the page. He also genuinely liked the sets — René Magritte by way of Windows XP, big open fields and Technicolor whimsy — and had enough affection for the premise to finish the movie. His verdict was that a really good anti-war comedy was buried somewhere in here and never got out. He gave it above Angel’s Egg and felt a little sheepish about it.
Sean was less charitable. He liked Michael Gambon as the villain General Zevo — expressive eyes, genuine menace — and appreciated the military commentary every time it surfaced, which wasn’t often enough. Everything around it was nails on a chalkboard: the repetitive music, the incoherent world-building, the toy factory that seemed to exist in a void with no customers and no stakes. His research turned up that the production had such a hard time marketing the film that they just put Robin Williams in a field in costume and told him to ad-lib for commercials. Those commercials, Sean reported, were significantly more entertaining than the movie. He called it “creatively ugly” and “a curious misfire” and gave it a 44. He also gave Robin Wright one point just for looking good in the silly costumes throughout.
John was most methodical. He went in with a scoring rubric: five points per genuine laugh. He counted eight funny moments — the bumper cars at the funeral, the three-and-four-star general bit, LL Cool J sprinting through a field mid-prayer, the fake vomit practical effect (“we’re under attack by crossword puzzles”), the collapsing room, Robin Williams deflecting the bathtub confession, the robot sister reveal played completely straight, and the very last line which hit him so hard after two hours of exhaustion that he may have cried a little. Eight moments × five points = 40. Everything in between was him hitting the arrow key on his keyboard to see how much was left.
The final toy battle drew particular fire from all three. The military drones have ballistic missiles and excellent treading. The opposition is rubber ducks and wind-up animals. “Sheep to the slaughter” was the phrase used. The fact that the good toys somehow win this engagement was treated as an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
Roger Ebert called it “all dressed up with nowhere to go” and gave it two and a half stars out of four. The group thought that was generous. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 20%. Sam noted this was still better than it deserved. John noted that Redditors online inexplicably love it, and then let that information sit there.
The core problem, everyone agreed, was that no one said no to Barry Levinson or Robin Williams at any point in production. Levinson spent years getting this movie made. At some point during those years, a redraft might have helped. The script never figured out whether this was a kids' movie, a dark satire, or a surrealist art film, and so it lurched between all three without committing to any of them.