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HBO Max: Toys (1992) - Reviewed
Writer-producer-director
Barry Levinson’s mammoth-sized decade-spanning dream project Toys took
years to develop, produce and shoot only to face a poor opening weekend
followed by an even poorer critical reception before disappearing off the near
face of the Earth. Despite a now famous and
frequently parodied trailer of the film’s leading star Robin Williams riffing
on the gargantuan studio set about what the film is, Toys was an
expensive, daring and overtly artsy flop whose glorious sensory excesses were undermined
by the fact that most viewers did not know what to make of this curious
director-driven folly. Thirty years
later, that reception mostly remains unchanged but thanks to a new restoration
airing exclusively on the streaming platform HBO Max, Toys now has a
chance to be seen and reassessed as a most unique once-in-a-lifetime film
production never seen before or since.
An
ornate, sumptuous fable taking place somewhere in a fantasy world of the
director’s devising, Toys concerns a children’s toy factory named Zevo Toys
which is in trouble after the company president dies, leaving the keys to
managing the company to his older brother Leland (Michael Gambon), a general in
the US military. The late owner’s son
Leslie Zevo (Robin Williams), a childlike carefree and whimsical apprentice at
the toy factory, grows suspicious of his new manager who begins steering the
company towards militarism. Soon Leslie
discovers Leland is manufacturing weaponized children’s army toys intended to
be remote controlled by children unaware of their true purposes. It’s up to Leslie and his comrades to
overthrow their new mad company president before he destroys the factory and
perhaps the world entire.
From
top to bottom, Toys is truly otherworldly in form. At once magical and surreal with truly
epically magnificent production design by Italian artist Ferdinando Scarfiotti
who spent a whole year designing and building the sets, the film comes at you
like a freak event of artistic nature.
Grandiose in size yet mercurial in motives, Toys also sports
brilliantly wacky costume design by Albert Wolsky, an arresting and moving
score by Trevor Horn and Hans Zimmer and breathtaking cinematography by Adam
Greenberg. Toys as a purely technical exercise is as ambitious as some
of the greatest silent film epics driven by expressionism and spectacle. You ask yourself how this came to be and
tragically when it was first released in 1992, audiences were unclear on why
they endured a construct as bafflingly drenched in futurist fantasy pop art comedy
such as this.
Starring
a delightfully looney Robin Williams who makes full use of his improvisational
skills set to create an equally extraterrestrial clown as leading man of the
world of Toys. Michael Gambon as
the film’s lunatic general keen on fulfilling his mad dreams of jingoistic
grandeur with overtly purposeless warfare remains one of the great British
actors who creates an equally cartoonish counterpart to Williams’ madcap
slapstick hero. Also turning over strong
supporting roles are Jack Warden, Joan Cusack, Robin Wright, LL Cool J and even
includes Jamie Foxx’s very first big screen appearance, rounding out what is
essentially a star-studded cast set free in one of the largest studio built
film sets ever constructed. Special
attention goes to Cusack for playing the hero Leslie’s sister Alsatia who
emerges as one of the film’s quirkiest characters which is saying something in
a picture loaded with them.
Unfolding
and resolving with the dovetailed innocence of a children’s pop-up book yet
with a dark undercurrent running through the whole endeavor, Toys is a
triumph of worldbuilding but whose central points about how children’s toys can
contribute to negatively indoctrinating youths by normalizing violence tend to
get lost on the viewer. Mostly while
your eyes are wowed by the sets, you aren’t always sure of what the film’s
brainchild was really getting at. Moreover,
the film isn’t always that funny and tonally leaps from place to place not
always gracefully. While some scenes are
extraordinary with sets that transform around the actors in real time, others
play like jokes that land with a thud.
Still,
for all the good and bad, Toys remains a genuinely fascinating artifact
of the early 1990s studio magic dream factory style of filmmaking. Intended to be Barry Levinson’s directorial
debut, the film sat dormant for a decade before a Best Picture and Best Picture
win for Rain Man granted Levinson carte blanche ala John Boorman’s Zardoz
after the success of Deliverance.
Though I’m unsure if I’m ready to declare Toys a masterpiece, certainly
among the absolute strangest films I’ve ever seen, it does remain an
extraordinary picture unlike anything seen before or since that is absolutely-worth
seeing at least once. There will never
be a picture quite like it again yet for all the film’s flaws (and there are
many), this is as close to the idea of movies opening up a box full of magic as
modern cinema has come.
--Andrew Kotwicki