Toy soldiers

Rating: 5/10 (16 April 2016)

Director Cary Fukunaga brings us the turmoil of war as experienced by child soldiers through the eyes and words of Agu (Abraham Attah).
The film starts of sweetly, in a safe zone of an unnamed West African country, Agu and his friends go about with a television box without a screen entertaining villagers and UN soldiers. They sell the TV set as a box of imagination.
Before long in the country ravaged with civil war, they are abandoned by the UN soldiers, his father and brother are killed, he is separated from his mother and sister and under the tutelage of the Commandant (Idris Elba) in order to survive he goes from being a playful young boy to a brutal soldier as he is firstly forced to hack a man to death.
The Commandant is a sadistic mercenary, who trains the child soldiers and at night selects some of the boys to rape. Agu has a friendship with fellow child soldier, Strika who are both abused by the Commandant.
When it seems the rebels might achieve victory, the chief has little use of a savage like the Commandant who might now be a liability and a perfect candidate for the war crimes tribunal.
The film to me felt unfocused, I felt the issue was better dealt with in a film like Blood Diamond. By setting the action in an unnamed country we are at loss as to what the conflict was about. Was it tribal or religious?
The film is grim, some of the scenes are barbaric. At the end Agu ends in a place where he could be mentally repaired.
The issue of child soldiers is a current issue, children who lose their innocence and humanity to the horrors of war.