Movie of the Week: Toys

Alexa: Guys, this movie is such a mess, I don’t even know where to begin. The one compliment I will give “Toys” is it’s a delight to look at. Its sets and costumes are bold, fun and capture the playful spirit of childhood beautifully. It’s the sort of place the kid inside everyone would love to get lost, a world of imagination made real. I get the sense that this dynamic vision popped into director Barry Levinson’s mind first, and he built a flimsy story around it to bring it to life. Behind the extravagant spectacle of it all, “Toys” is lifeless. Its characters are devoid of personality. It lacks an emotional hook, so the stakes feel low even though the threat of war hangs in the balance. The sluggish pacing doesn’t help. Without any substance to support it, this visually engaging movie becomes just plain dull. And it’s frustrating because there are some good ideas here. It has the potential to be a captivating world, and its central themes about childhood innocence and the power of imagination are compelling, but that’s where the magic ends. Its talented cast is wasted on a concept that feels half finished. But it did make me miss Robin Williams terribly. The moments when “Toys” just allowed him to do his thing and play around with his signature voices and joke delivery were among the movie’s few bright spots.

Joel: It’s almost depressing to think about how much time and care must have gone into creating the visual look for this movie. There was clearly a ton of thought put into how each set was supposed to look, and it clearly took painstaking hours to make sure that every set looked just so. But it’s clear that the visual look came first, and everything else about the movie came a distant second. Nothing about this movie works. It’s a plot that manages to be all over the place and go nowhere at the same time. Characters aren’t consist from scene to scene sometimes from sentence to sentence. And while the movie is very visually interesting to look at, without any sort of substance to hang the visuals on, the movie ends up feeling less magical or whimsical, and more along the lines of simply strange, and totally distant with itself.

Part of what’s so frustrating about this movie is how much potential it feels like the movie has. The fun toys vs. war toys idea leading up to a literal showdown between the two is a good idea and it feels like it should have worked. The same thing can be said for the character of Leslie. Robin Williams seems like the perfect choice to play a Willy Wonka of Toys character, and the moments where he goes full Robin Williams are the comedic highlights of the movie. But so much of the movie feels in conflict with itself. Leslie is supposed to be timid, but also bold and outgoing. The General is supposed to be a scheming, evil villain, but also bumbling about in the unfamiliar world of the toy factory. It feels like each character has at least one scene where their motivation is in direct conflict with all their other scenes, that is the characters who have any defined motivation at all. This is one of those movies where not only is the movie bad, but the thought of what the movie could have been had the whole thing clicked better just makes it that much worse.

Chris: How has Terry Gilliam not tried to remake this movie? It seems like his kind of movie and it's quite obvious upon revisiting it that Toys is a truckload of missed opportunities that just needed a better story to go along with the interesting idea. Now, I'm not saying that Toys should be remade because the movie has been so synonymous with Robin Williams' impressive legacy which is far because his performance is really the only salvageable aspect. The fact is, you'd be hard-pressed to find any actor capable of taking up the mantle of this role with an ounce of Williams' ability. This is a rough movie to get through just because the story is so disjointed but if you can somehow ignore that and look at all the pretty things, there's a ton of pretty things to admire.

Jason: This movie is… odd. I remember seeing it as a wee lad because the incredible visual smorgasbord stuck with me for decades. I didn’t remember anything of the story. And that is probably because the story is so thin to begin with. A star studded cast can only carry a movie so far. And as for everything else, it just feels uneven. The pacing is up and down, the tone switches wildly without notice. And even some of the characters feel uneven, most notable, Robin Williams’ Leslie. He is supposed to be this child-like, uninhibited man-child yet he makes jokes about “getting laid” and swears more than a few times.. It ruins the innocent feeling we’re supposed to get from him. The most stable character is easily Joan Cusack (the better of the Cusacks, IMHO) being weird ol’ Joan Cusack. I dug the 90’s-tastic soundtrack inside the factory, even if it did get a bit old after a while. And I always love seeing classic actors like Donald O’Connor get roles late in life.

This movie felt like it was nothing but a spark of an idea that they tried to grow into something grand. The end result, however, comes across as cobbled together. It just sadly never picked up on the imagination it was trying to sell.