From: dave@bradley.bradley.edu (David Vessell)
Subject: REVIEW: Toys
Organization: Bradley University
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 21:04:14 GMT

Ahort!  My first non-music review.  Be patient with me.

TOYS [PG-13]
Robin Williams, Michael Gambon, Joan Cusack, Robin Wright, LL Cool J.
dir. Barry Levinson

Visuals can fool a person into liking a mediocre movie.  Hell, I fell hook,
line, and sinker for "The Lawnmower Man" despite Brosnan & Fahey's
embarassingly bad acting.  Long, long ago, I fell for "Tron", which is
practically devoid of plot.  Visuals cannot rescue a movie with neither
acting nor a plot.  Makes sense, I think.

"Toys" does not lack for acting, and the plot is no more groundless than
your typical Tim Burton movie.  But for some reason, I walked out of the
theatre after seeing "Toys" feeling less than satisfied.

The general plot goes something like this:  Robin Williams is Leslie Zevo,
the gently eccentric son of the gently eccentric owner of Zevo Toys who 
kicks off and leaves the business to his brother, a career military man
played by Michael Gambon.  Gambon is as eccentric as his deceased brother, but
in a much less gentle way, and proceeds to transform the previously
light-hearted toy factory into a security-paranoid breeding ground for war
toys, real and imagined.  The movie eventually leads to a confrontation
between Williams and Gambon and...well, go spend your five if you really
need to know what goes from here.

Joan Cusack plays Leslie's outer-orbit sister Alsatia, Robin Wright plays a
worker who Leslie falls for (and vice versa), and LL Cool J plays Gambon's
son, Leslie's cousin.  The race thing is never addressed, which is probably
just as well, as it leaves an amusing mystery amongst an already heavy
suspension of reality.

Individual cudos go to Joan Cusack and LL Cool J.  Cusack sparkles as the
gentle little-girl space cadet.  It would have been all too easy to play
Alsatia as a typical slapstick ditz, but instead her characterization
suggests a sharp, insightful eccentric.  LL Cool J, obviously not an actor
by trade, turns in a respectable if amateur performance as the too-serious
paramilitary nut who finds it necessary to camouflage himself as a pile of
couch cushions when visiting family.  Of course, J is a captive of the
script and doesn't add all that much to the character, but his deadpan
delivery is charming.

It's not that Robin Williams did a bad job, just that he didn't do a
spectacular job.  After seeing him in "Good Morning, Vietnam" and
"Aladdin", one expects energy and sheer crazed but tightly controlled
chaos.  Williams's performance here features small, confined burst of that
same mania but Levinson doesn't quite give him enough slack to really
sparkle.  Williams is also undermined by the script, which starts out
strong but crumbles right in the middle of the movie's climax.

Michael Gambon turns in a good role as the evil military man who takes his
toys a few steps too far.  Though his character grows more and more
ridiculous as the movie wears on, Gambon holds you and you accept it.
Though his funny moments in the movie are few and far between, he makes the
most of them, particularly the scene where he approaches his invalid,
mushmouthed father for advice on whether or not to take over the company.

Robin Wright is fun to look at, and she does a competent job of playing
Williams's love interest, but that's about it.

Did I mention visuals?  The toys, the mammoth factory sets, the incredible
shrinking room where Williams consults with his R&D team on fake vomit, the
computer animation.  Though the movie is not the special effect tour de
force that "The Lawnmower Man" was, it doesn't need to be.  But the visuals
and cinematography make you feel wide open and claustrophobic at all the
right times.

One aspect of the movie that most people are bound to miss is the excellent
soundtrack.  Hans Zimmer and Trevor Horn provide most of the incidental
music and write a good portion of the songs used.  Wendy and Lisa provide
"The Closing of the Year", which starts as a gentle Christmas song and
jumps into grand orchestral children's choir funk stomp mode soon after.
Pat Metheny lends his guitar to another gentle instrumental (the title of
which I can't for the life of me recall), which metamorphoses into a
hauntingly weird operatic number once Grace Jones's vocals join it later.
But the soundtrack is made by two absolutely excellent tracks, "Happy
Workers" by Tori Amos (yes, Tori completists have another album to buy) and
"The Mirror Song" by Thomas Dolby.  The former accompanies the first
panoramic factory scene, the latter used in a mock music video staged by
Leslie and Alsatia and is probably the best song Dolby has done in years.

Well, wrap it all up together and what do you get?  Eh.  The movie starts
out great, then stalls, then gains momentum as the confrontation between
Williams and Gambon begins, then crashes horribly on the ending.  The
ending is what ruins the movie.  Too bad, because otherwise "Toys" would be
a movie talked about for years to come.  Without the ending, "Toys" would
have rated a +3 on the davE scale.  Instead....


davE rating: +1


(davE scale -5 to +5 linear)

-- 
*davE*   Making the world safe for intelligent dance music.  dave@bradley.edu.
########## David L. Vessell -- Bradley University Computing Services #########
Your shame is neverending. Just one psychological drama after another.-Erasure