1992 Directed by Barry Levinson
Leslie Zevo is a fun-loving inventor who must save his late father's toy factory from his evil uncle, Leland, a war-mongering general who rules the operation with an iron fist and builds weapons disguised as toys.
The main sin is that it isn't weird or demented enough (for a brief moment it shows signs of being sublimely strange); it's as if a bunch of studio suits tried to groupthink 'odd' and 'creative' and this is all they could muster.
It's other sins are:
an excessive run time,
an inappropriate love scene,
a virulently dated and awful soundtrack,
a half-finished production design,
the story,
and the resolution.
Cogently, flawlessly Dante-esque satirical look at War in the age of Consumerism (note my Capital Letters: I Mean Business). State-subsidized war morphing into consumerism may register as overly simplistic and didactic, but in fact both the military and the toy manufacturers are fucking capitalist tools, a brilliant insight. Construction-tank metal becomes toy-metal plastic (THEY ARE NOT THE SAME), the catalyst for a generation of youth misunderstanding the napalm-istic impact of video games (unlike Barry Levinson, who Understands War and the horror of its trivialization). Some might mistake its blunt premise as the confused, semi-senile satire of a man updating a decade-old script with piecemeal details, but in fact the film is an urgent wake-up call, a post-Persian Gulf earnest, decrying…
It’s beyond frustrating that a film that looks this visually unique and imaginative can be such an arduous bore to watch. The film is 2 hours long and yet there’s only enough plot to last roughly half of this time. The rest is padded with meandering dialogue and distractions that completely deter from the story. In any other film I’d possibly appreciate the films dedication to spending time with its characters in smaller moments, but this is not a film that holds either the time or place for such lengthy insight. With the exception of the wide-eyed and child-like Joan Cusack, the cast are either wasted in their positions or speak way too often, be it through horribly undecided accents (Gambon) or just general irritation (Williams). I just don’t feel like there’s much of anything here for anyone to fully enjoy, and its themes are touched on more interestingly in plenty more, much better films.
Bizarre fucking film, a passion project for director Barry Levinson, that oozes with creativity and imagination. It's a shambolic mess at times, too long, too indulgent, but it is carried by it's enthusiasm, it's design work and it's game cast,including Robin Williams, Michael Gambon, Joan Cusack and a very funny LL Cool J. It has some good values at it's core as well, in it's championing of traditionalism and innocence over consumerism and war toys.
Now a word on Robin Williams. never before have I seen such a unanimous outpouring of grief over the death of someone as we have seen the last few days since the tragic news broke. None of use knew him, but we feel like we…
I've long suspected that admitting that I loved the movie Toys as a kid and still like it as an adult might destroy the credibility of my opinion on any other movie or movie-related topic. I've waited, over the years, for a revisionist cult following to form around it, but it appears that people hated it in 1992 and have hated it ever since. As an adult, I can see how elements of it could be grating - if ever a movie belonged on the spectrum, this is it (that I find most of it's Asperger's-y deadpan jokes and non sequiturs hilarious says I don't know what about me). And I had to begrudgingly knock it down about half a…
An entertaining mess that looks phenomenal, features some great talent at their peak, and 'toys' with some intriguing anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate themes. Too bad the story never coheres into something more profound.
Barry Levinson creates a pretty fantastic universe in Toys, but boy was I tired of watching this movie after the first hour. Robin Williams is barely starring in this thing. There's so much going on.
I remember seeing this movie as a kid an being intrigued by its visual style. Watching it again after so many years I can honestly say that I enjoyed the weirdness throughout and that the basic storyline intrigued me enough to keep watching. Unfortunately and oddly enough, the final thirty minutes, though filled with all kinds of explosions and whatnot, got boring extremely quick.
Rewatched it because I couldn’t remember the plot, and then I was like, “what plot?”
But it wasn’t all bad because JOAN CUSACK.
"whoa that gravestone's blowing bubbles. y'know we're all getting one of those when we die" -- amanda
Barry Levinson's anti-war tribute to Magritte is a magnificent farrago, and probably the single film that triggered my lifelong affection for broken movies done in by too much ambition and singularity of vision. The tone goes spectacularly wrong, and the performances are muddled (except Joan Cusack, brilliantly naïve), but Levinson's commitment to the weird dreamworld he creates, and the blunt force message, turns into a something more compelling than tedious (though it has tedious stretches). Would have been better as a pure kids movie.
Robin's character Leslie Zevo does display some of the typical & characteristic Robin Williams comedic improv traits, but other than that, this is not one of his better movies, nor performances. His performance is almost like as a live-action cartoon character from a TV show - and yet Leslie is in most cases a dull character. Therefore, it is unfortunate that Barry Levinson was unable to help Robin recreate that magic from Good Morning, Vietnam that led to him winning a Golden Globe for Best actor as Adrian Cronauer. Leslie Zevo is no Adrian Cronauer - but neither is he as memorable and cool as Peter Pan from Hook, Aladdin's Genie and many other worthy and notable characters that he has…
What a weird fucking movie. Its inability to balance totally different tones and its ultimate failure in not knowing what sort of movie it wants to be results in an overlong experiment with spectacular set design, a cool song that shows up half-way thru, and one good laugh out loud joke near the end.
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