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DIRECTED BY: Barry Levinson
FEATURING: Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, Michael Gambon, Robin Wright, LL Cool J, Donald O’Connor
PLOT: Whimsical toymaker Kenneth Zevo leaves his company to his army general brother Leland, bypassing his head-in-the-clouds son Leslie; when Leland shifts the factory’s production to military weapons controlled by children, Leslie goes into battle with his mad uncle to save the company and the world from violence and mayhem.
COMMENTS: A while back, on the occasion of my review of the big ball of whimsy that is Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, my colleagues here at 366 HQ took to the comment section to observe that I missed the opportunity to pair it up with a review of a similarly fanciful tale of the life-changing power of toys. I don’t regret passing up that moment, because now I can don my Santa hat and give Toys the chance to stand on its own merits. And now that I’ve done that, I have to say that it makes me think more favorably upon Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.
Toys was a notorious bomb at the time of its release, an outcome that surely had something to do with the wild disconnect between the movie audiences were promised and the one they got. Toys was pitched courtesy of a very buzzy teaser that featured star Williams alone in a field riffing without restraint with nary a single frame of the actual movie to distract. If you saw this (or if you had popped into the multiplex auditorium next door to hear Williams similarly unleashed in Aladdin), you were primed for a raucous comedy featuring Robin-off-the-chain. The opening minutes of saccharine Christmas imagery, pastoral nostalgia, and a decidedly un-funky carol from Wendy and Lisa must have been a real cold shower.
It turns out that Toys is a dour film, beginning with a funeral, ending with a war, and delivering a volume’s worth of personality quirks and emotional damage in between. The mere existence of toys is supposed to be a balm of mirth, but even these people who rely upon them seem to derive little joy from them. This is a movie whose idea of showing the jolly, happy world of toymaking is to score it with the warm, sentimental tones of Tori Amos. (When the same song returns to demonstrate the drudgery of toiling under a new regime, the only change is to give it a techno remix.) You want fun? The dying toy magnate has a goofy beanie hat hooked up to a heart monitor. The quirky daughter lives inside an enormous swan that closes like a coffin. The straight-laced nephew converts to the side of light and life only because he discovers that he and his father have been sleeping with the same nurse. I think that delight is supposed to leaven the sadness, but the sadness actually crushes delight under its oppressive weight. No one is having a good time; even the people play-testing fake vomit are obsessive and pedantic, and it’s hard to imagine that the finished product would be much more entertaining, since Zevo’s toys are all throwbacks to the lead wind-up models of Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TOYS (1992)
