(In French, On Cable TV, September 2019) Some movies are like surprise bags filled with things both cool and dull, and Toys fits squarely in this category. It’s visually sumptuous, filled with interesting actors and directed with a unique vision. Alas, it’s also juvenile when it shouldn’t, thematically wobbly and often not as witty as it thinks it is. Set in a world not quite like ours, it features a rich toymaker bequeathing his company to his military brother rather than his eccentric son. As we may expect, toy production soon takes a back seat to war machines, with the just-as-expected son fighting back. On paper, it’s not much and one of the worse aspects of the film is how it eventually becomes tiresome once the visuals become familiar. But that would be dismissing far too easily the power of those visuals, especially in the first act: For the art direction of the film (written and directed by Barry Levinson) is deliciously off-beat, inserting strange and whimsical visuals in contexts where we wouldn’t expect them. A lot of it harkens back to Magritte paintings, including an over-the-top spoof of MTV videos. The dynamo at the centre of it all is Robin Williams, in a curiously subdued performance. The supporting cast includes Joan Cusack, Robin Wright, L. L. Cool J as a hilariously overprepared military man and Jamie Foxx in his first (small) role … and Debi Mazar in a short but striking role as a libidinous nurse. Unfortunately, the result is less than its components: While the film isn’t exactly aimed at kids, it does feature a simplistic plot and an anti-war moral sense that eventually turns against itself when the heroes go to war against their opponents. There are several cute fillips in the plot, but it still comes across as a witty setting let down by a less-than-witty script. I’ll grant that the film was unusually prescient in some aspects: its discussion of swarms of “toy” war machines controlled by teenagers eerily prefigures the military drone era. But the disappointment with the rest of the script is real—it never transforms its fascinating weirdness into more than a merely satisfying narrative experience, and that’s a wasted opportunity. Still, let’s admire the audacity of the visuals, most of them achieved without CGI: I bet that a remake would look very, very different today.
