Small Soldiers (1998) Movie Review

Alan Abernathy works at his dad’s toyshop and illegally procures some new action figures. He leaves for the night and returns to find that all the action figures have disappeared and the shop ransacked. It’s not a burglar however; the toys are programmed using military grade microchip. This enables the toys to have never before seen AI capabilities. This spawns a game of cat and mouse between the two factions of toys. We have ourselves a movie.

This movie is basically a pile of bollocks. My first major gripe with the movie is the main character. Alan is supposedly a locally renowned rebel. It’s even said that he got kicked out of two schools before moving to this town. If I’m honest, I could probably beat this guy in a fight. I don’t know if it was implied that none of this was true but either way this character was pure crap. The development of the character is just stupid. Alan befriends the leader of one of the toy factions. This makes absolutely no sense. Firstly, I was under the assumption that people befriended others for actual reasons. This toy destroyed Alan’s dad’s shop, brought all of his life-impeding toy friends to Alan’s house and brought Alan into a literal war between two groups of military grade toys. Despite this, Alan, the supposedly rebellious delinquent manages to find it somewhere in his heart to have affection for this hunk of plastic.

The special effects in this movie actually make me want to gouge my own eyes out. I cannot even believe that someone earned money by creating this disgusting CGI pile of garbage. It isn’t even consistent. The lesser commando toys looked pretty authentic, while Tommy Lee Jones’ character looks like he has just been melted down and vaguely put back together using his remaining sludge pile.

There are very few things that make this film not seem like something stolen from Beelzebub’s bedroom. Luckily, the movie every so often has some decently entertaining scenes. Namely, any scene that has David Cross in it. Despite his overall stupidity, this movie really can’t be salvaged from the landfill site of idiocy it has built around itself.

This is very close to being one of the worst and dumbest movies that I have ever had the displeasure to witness. The director is lucky they had David Cross to counteract the horrific acting by the unbelievably bad actor who played Alan. This movie is truly terrible. I give this movie a 2/10 - Terrible

Have you seen ‘Small Soldiers’? If you have, let me know what you thought of it by leaving a comment on this review. Perhaps even suggest a movie for me to review next.