Small Soldiers is a movie that I hadn't watched in about 15 years before I sat down to watch it last night for this review. I've only ever owned it on VHS and of course until three months ago, I didn't have a VCR to play the movie on. I also don't think it's ever been on Netflix. At least not here in Canada. I really struggled to pick a movie for this week's movie review. But then I saw the VHS case sitting on my shelf and decided to go ahead and review this movie.
I loved this movie when I was a kid. Like most of the movies I saw as a kid, I didn't see Small Soldiers in theatres. I did see it on VHS though. The movie came out in the summer of 1998 so it was probably my 12th birthday or Christmas of 1998 that I got this movie on VHS. This was my first exposure to a lot of actors. It was my first time seeing Gregory Smith, who I would later watch on the WB series Everwood, which was created by Greg Berlanti, and the ABC series Rookie Blue, Kevin Dunn, who played Shia LaBeouf's dad in the first three Transformers movies, Dick Miller, David Cross, and Denis Leary. This wasn't my first encounter with Kirsten Dunst though as she'd been in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation during the show's seventh season, and I'm pretty sure I'd already seen Jumanji by the time I saw Small Soldiers.
Small Soldiers is such a '90s movie. By that I mean this movie could not have been made in any other decade except for the '90s. Not because it's too cheesy to have been made in any other decade, but also with today's technology, there's no way Larry could've gotten his hands on the munitions chip without anyone knowing about it right away. It just wouldn't work. Also Major Chip Hazard and the Commando Elite would not have been able to sneak around so easily.
I love Alan and Christy. Apart from Archer and the other Gorgonites, they're probably my favourite characters in the entire movie. They're the most '90s teens that you could have in this movie, but they're likeable and they aren't annoying as they would be if the movie was being made today. Though Christy's turn from being with her boyfriend, Brad, who shows up for like two scenes with only a few lines of dialogue, to being with Alan is pretty weak, even if Alan did rescue her from the Commando Elite and the Gwendy Dolls while Brad gets knocked out and then mysteriously disappears by the time Alan and Christy get back to their houses after defeating the original set of Commando Elite figures. Though I guess Christy was attracted to Alan throughout the movie and it was his actions that made her make that final turn. It's just most movies would've made a big deal out of the turn, but surprisingly this one doesn't.
It turns out that Sarah Michelle Gellar voices one of Christy's Gwendy Dolls after the Commando Elite bring them to life. Christina Ricci voices another one. I never actually knew that because we didn't watch through the credits at the end. We'd turn off the tape as soon as the closing credits started rolling. Even when I watched this movie fifteen years ago, I'd never watch the closing credits. So that was a cool tidbit to find out during this viewing.
Larry and Irwin are probably the weirdest characters in this movie. I mean there's nothing unique about Irwin as he's just a nervous geek who works for a toy company, but Larry confuses me. Mainly because he's the one who decides to put the munitions chip in the Commando Elite and Gorgonites and that kind of says something about the guy's personality.
Also, why would a firm like Globotech want to buy a toy company? I mean Globotech is like Wayne Enterprises and Stark Industries, which had contracts with the Department of Defense in the DC and Marvel universes, before Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark changed their policies about that, so it seems like a pretty arbitrary decision for Mars to buy a toy company. I guess it had to happen for the plot of the movie to start.
One thing I am confused about is the timeline of the movie when it comes to Alan and his family. It's heavily implied that the Abernathys had just recently moved into the house behind the Fimples's house because of Alan being kicked out of the school he used to go to. But, it also seems like that Alan's dad, Stuart had owned the toy store for a while, since Alan seems to have known Joe the delivery guy for a while and a kid mentions that they never have anything good in the store. So the way I took it is that the store had been around for a while, it's just the Abernathys just moved into a house that ended up being in biking distance for Alan, since he doesn't seem to be able to drive a car. The movie doesn't make any of this really clear, but I guess it doesn't need to in order for the plot to work.
I also think there should've been more scenes between Alan and his parents. Not only because Kevin Dunn is a great actor and plays the father of a troubled teenager really well, as we would later see in Transformers, but their whole conflict feels like it could be fleshed out more than it actually was. It's pretty much the inciting element for Alan to buy the Commando Elite and Gorgonite toys from Joe in the first place. There just isn't really anything there. I've never owned the movie on DVD so I don't know what deleted scenes are on the DVD releases. So maybe the conflict between Alan and his parents is more fleshed out in the deleted scenes. That's really my only real complaint about the movie.
Before I get to my final thoughts on the movie, I would like to talk about the soundtrack for the movie. Jerry Goldsmith, who composed the score for many blockbuster films in the '70s, '80s and '90s, including a few of the Star Trek films, did the score for this movie and it is actually pretty great. However, the songs selected for the movie are pretty '90s. While it's not on the soundtrack album, "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls is included in the movie when Christy's father tries to surrender to the Commando Elite and for some reason the stereo goes on, with that song playing. Again, a moment like that could only be in a movie made in the '90s. There are other iconic songs in the movie like "War" by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen, and "Love Is a Battlefield" by Pat Benatar.
Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall I actually think that Small Soldiers holds up surprisingly well for a movie that was released almost 22 years ago. It's fun, it's cheesy and like I said, it is such a '90s movie. Aside from like Men in Black and Space Jam I don't think you could get a movie that is more '90s than this. It's great and I love it. It was definitely one of my favourite movies when I was 12 years old and I went back to it pretty frequently when I was a teenager in the 2000s. Especially after I got the TV/VCR combo set from my uncle for my 16th birthday and could watch the movie in my bedroom. I'm giving Small Soldiers 9.9/10 stars because I thought the conflict between Alan and his parents was fairly flimsy and even Christy's relationship with her parents isn't actually shown at all in the movie. While it's not a masterpiece film, it's still a really good movie despite the fact that it's a cheesy '90s kids action flick.
Wikipedia Article for the Soundtrack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Soldiers_(soundtrack)
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