‘Great, the school gets taken over by terrorists and I’m still on pots and pans...’
Ahh the video shop. We had Hollywood Nites, Clearview, Apollo and a Blockbuster all within walking distance. A trip to the video shop was a trip to another world. So many titles. So many covers. Each one more enticing than the last. I remember staring aghast at the covers of Hellraiser and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was strangely attracted to the box of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. I never really knew why. Looking back, one of the great thrills of the video shop was renting something you’d never heard of. The risk factor. If it was rubbish, it would be a long wait until your pocket money had replenished enough to rent something else. Toy Soldiers was one of those risks. I can’t pinpoint exactly when we rented this one, but it was at some point during the ’90s so all was right with the world. I loved it back then and I enjoyed it again as an adult…
When an all-male prep school is overrun by terrorists led by their insidious leader Luis Cali (Andrew Divoff), the boys, captained by teenage tearaway Billy Tepper (Sean Astin), must fight back. The stellar supporting cast features such ’80s and ’90s cinematic icons as Will Wheaton, R. Lee Ermy and Denholm Elliott. Lovely stuff.
The thought of students taking over the school is an enticing prospect for any teenager. While this concept has been covered before in both If… and Taps, two excellent and underseen movies, Toy Soldiers takes that concept and adds a Die Hard-esque twist. While elements of the plot are a bit silly, it’s never entirely clear what the endgame is for the terrorists, the overall tone of the film is one of severity, and this serves it well. As with Taps, this film doesn’t need cheesy one-liners or constant explosions to work. The talented cast and the propulsive nature of the story are enough.
Writer-director Daniel Petrie Jr has form in the action genre having already gifted the world with the screenplay of Beverley Hills Cop, and so it is no surprise that Toy Soldiers is a perfectly serviceable and well-made action thriller. One thing I love about this era is that there is no attempt to sanitise the film for a younger audience. Or rather, Petrie is savvy enough to know that a younger audience doesn’t want cinema to be sanitised, which is presumably why this film was so successful in the home rental market. That means women being thrown out of windows. Dick and fart jokes. Mass shootings. All the good stuff.
Toy Soldiers will be catnip for anyone that grew up in the ’80s or ’90s but unlike many of the films from that era, this film has also aged pretty well. It deserves a higher standing in the pantheon of ’90s cinema.