The Future of Warfare

Sometimes when you go back and watch films from previous eras, you stumble across things that feel out of place. Review comedies this last month, I watched a number of older comedies that, for one reason or another, haven’t aged all that well. We’re talking about the likes of The Kentucky Fried Movie, Meatballs, Screwballs, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. These films were all popular when they came out but, due to questionable content that wouldn’t be put in films now, bad takes on politics, or just playing in genres that no longer exist in modern filmmaking, these movies don’t have anywhere near the same laughs, or impact, that they might once have carried.

But then we turn to an oddball film from the 1990s and, while nothing in the film is overtly offensive, the film manages to age so poorly that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually taking it seriously at all. Toys came out in 1992 and while it didn’t set the world on fire, garnering less than half of its $50 Mil production budget during its run in theaters, it was at least hailed for its ambition and production design. It gained some favor by audiences when it was released on home video, and then faded into obscurity. Watching it again all these years later, I can understand why as it’s a very strange, weird, at times surreal movie that doesn’t lack design and inspiration but totally fails when it comes to putting any of those ideas to good use.

What stuck out to me the most, though, was just how poorly its main plotline has aged. The film goes on and on about the dangers of turning toys into machines of war. Drones are bad, it says. We shouldn’t train people to think that killing is something you can do from behind a computer monitor. And then war games caught on among the populace, and drone fighters became something that the military has invested billions of dollars into developing. Everything this film railed against, with the heroes cheering when they bring down the evil military machine, has come to pass. Of everything I’ve watched this month, this one film feels the most like a relic of a bygone era.

The film focuses on Zevo Toys, a company making toys for all ages that are, well, kinda retro. They’re apparently one of the biggest toy manufacturers in the world, and the company is run by Kenneth Zevo (Donald O'Connor) and his adult children Leslie (Robin Williams) and Alsatia (Joan Cusack). When Kenneth unexpectedly dies, he elects to leave the company not in the hands of Leslie, who he thinks isn’t mature enough yet to run the company but, instead, his own brother, Lieutenant General Leland Zevo (Michael Gambon). Leland has no interest in toys, but he agrees to take over the company since he doesn’t see a way to further his career (and get himself his prized fourth star on his shoulder) in the military.

Caring little about the toys, Leland does become interested in the company when he learns that, sometimes, there is industrial espionage. He brings in his own son, Captain Patrick Zevo (LL Cool J), to head security, and slowly the whole vibe of Zevo Toys changes. Then, once Leland gets into war toys, and sees how these can be designed and used for the actual military, he gets really excited. Design Leslie’s protestations, Leland starts taking up more and more space for his “special projects”, and these are far from the original Zevo brand. Leslie discovers that his uncle is making drones, tanks and planes that can be flown remotely, like video games, and is training children on using them. Fearing for the fate of the world, Leslie realizes that something has to be done. Zevo Toys has to be taken down… from the inside!

The whole plot of Toys feels like a cultural relic. The first issue is that, even for the 1990s, none of the toys being made in the movie actually feel like things kids would have wanted to play with. When you consider toys of that era – Nerf guns, Super Soakers, action figures, Barbies, and the like – those items aren’t reflected in the stock at Zevo. What the company makes are metal and plastic toys that would have been more at home in the 1950s. They’re novelty items, large wind ups and practical joke toys and the like. The only item ever shown that feels like it’s reaching forward, a VR headset, was so impractical in its design that it seemed like bad sci-fi in the movie. It doesn’t work.

That’s not to say the production aesthetic doesn’t work, per se, as from an artistic standpoint the film is gorgeous. Director Barry Levinson, who has a long and eclectic career mostly making dramas (and for whom this film feels like a weird spot in the middle of his filmography), clearly had a vision, and a visionary team, working on the film. I appreciate the design aesthetics of the film, but I just don’t think they fit into a movie that is clearly set in the 1990s (with video games and other toys out there from other toymakers). I’m not saying that the film had to have Zevo making branded TMNT and Barbie toys, just that the production designers should have had the company making things that seemed like comparable analogues to what kids were actually playing with.

That leads us to the crux of the film, where Leland wants to make video games and drones to train the future generations as soldiers of war. While that might have seemed scary back in 1992, very quickly we got to a point where kids playing war games, and the military using remote controlled drones, is just a fact of life. Hell, Wolfenstein 3D came out the same year as Toys and it was basically saying, “shooting in video games is cool.” Toys, like the toys Zevo is making, feels like it has an outdated idea of where the world was heading even in the era it was released.

If anything, I feel like this film pointed the way forward for what the military could do in the future. While this film is going on about how evil war toys are, how kids shouldn’t be trained on war games and how drones shouldn’t be used in war, I could see a military leader in 1992 going, “you know… that’s not such a bad idea, actually.” The last thirty years of war speak to the opposite effect of what Toys was railing again, and if the goal was to make toys of war seem bad and evil, well… I feel like the film didn’t do a very good job of selling that point.

It certainly doesn’t help that at two hours, this film is a real slog to get through. The early scenes are interesting, it rather twee in their design ideas, and there is fun to be had with each new, gonzo scene playing out. Over time, though, the strangeness gets less strange, and there’s less weird ideas being played with. A late scene of Leslie and others working on rubbery piles of fake vomit is one of the few good jokes, and one of the few weird scenes, the film has left in it. When it gets to the last act, which is little more than one protracted action sequence, I was utterly bored. All the great energy from the early part of the film is lost, as is all its humor.

That is the other big issue with the film: for all its great ideas and gonzo aesthetics, the film just isn’t funny enough. There are a few good chuckles, but most of the film is kind of dour in its tone. That scene with the fake vomit is the highlight as it’s one of the few times the film lets loose and really packs in joke after joke. We needed more of this, more fun to be had from one of the great masters of comedy, Williams, being surrounded in an absurdist world where anything he wants to do could happen. Putting Robin Williams in a toy factory where the sky's the limit should be more fun than this.

Toys has a lot of good ideas in it but none of the sense of how to make it work. I think, really, the issue boils down to Levinson. He directed mostly dramas and his directorial style here feels like he really wanted to make another drama. This film is dour and sad and strange, never light and funny like it should be. If the film could find the fun then even its weaker ideas would probably have seemed better. But in a film this full of itself, so sure that it was telling a story about a toy factory that mattered, it loses all the fun. You can paste over a lot of problems with big laughs, but when those laughs don’t come you’re left focusing on everything that doesn’t work. Toys doesn’t work.