Transcript

Luis (Toy Soldiers)

What's your name?

Billy (Toy Soldiers)

William Tepper.

Luis (Toy Soldiers)

William Tepper. What does your father do, William?

Billy (Toy Soldiers)

He's a contractor.

Luis (Toy Soldiers)

According to this, he owns the third. Largest construction company in the world.

Billy (Toy Soldiers)

Yeah, he's a contractor.

Luis (Toy Soldiers)

You're not afraid? Hmm?

Billy (Toy Soldiers)

Yes, I'm afraid.

Luis (Toy Soldiers)

Good. Don't fuck with me.

Steve

It's 2 Dads 1 Movie. It's the podcast where two middle aged dads sit around and shoot the about the movies of the 80s and 90s. Here are your hosts, Steve Paulo and Nic Briana.

Nic

All right everybody, how we doing? Movie heads. We are back.

Steve

Afternoon. Good evening.

Nic

How you doing, Steve?

Steve

I'm good, thanks, Nic. How are you doing?

Nic

I'm great, man. I'm very excited to talk about what we have to talk about here today.

Steve

Me too. This is going to be good.

Nic

Our movie as as announced at the end of the last podcast. Today we're getting into 1991's Toy Soldiers starring Sean Aston, Lou Goet Jr. And a whole bunch of. Hey, what's that guy from?

Steve

Guys, right? Yeah, I have definitely notes on that later and in fact I'll even get to bring it back to another USA action drama like we did last time, which is just amazing. Those little things happen. Yeah, that's right. Including Wil Wheaton and a bunch of other people. Yeah. Whose names I don't remember off the top of my head. But that's okay. Running time on Toy Soldiers, 112 minutes. It was written and directed by Daniel Petrie Jr. Co written by David. I'm going to say his name wrong. Kep, I believe probably scores. You know, Rotten Tomatoes did not care for this. It does not appear. This movie was very. Was received very well right when it came out, 41%, which is definitely not a fresh score. That's a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes. IMDb a little nicer to it, I think. I think maybe this is one of those movies where the audience has got a bit more love for it. And so a 6.6 on IMDb is pretty respectable for what the movie is.

Nic

Yeah, it kind of grows on you. I mean it's one of those movies that I remember seeing as a younger person and I thought it was cool just in the sense that it was the kids banding together type movie. And then the more I've seen it, there's just little goofy things in it and things that really make me enjoy it a lot more. But I was actually surprised to see that Rotten tomatoes score of 41%.

Steve

Okay, but you've never seen it.

Nic

Dude, I'm excited. I'm Excited to talk about this because, you know, again, I have a certain nostalgic value that I'm placing on this because this is something that came to me pretty close after it came out. So once it started hitting the movie channels and everything. So it's something I was watching in seventh, eighth grade when it was replaying on HBO and such. And if you haven't seen it until recently, it's definitely going to look a lot different to you.

Steve

Yeah, it's definitely. So, yeah, just make sure everybody listening is totally clear. This was Nic's pick. He and I go back and forth picking movies. Nic picked this one. I had never seen it before, which is fun. I think that's actually great that we can do that to each other and be like, hey, this is a movie that. That has meant a lot to me. Or I think we should watch and the other person hasn't even seen. Is very much in that sort of sub genre, I think that really existed in the 80s, died out by the early 90s. And this maybe is kind of, kind of the last example of it, of the group of kids doing what the military or SWAT or whoever can't seem to accomplish. Right. And defeating the terrorists or whoever, which we'll get into whether these guys were terrorists or not.

Nic

Later.

Steve

For me, Iron Eagle was like, that was the ultimate version of that. That. That's a movie I've watched a hundred times, easily. But also, if you've ever seen the Rescue, have you ever seen Red Dawn? Very similar to this film in that sense, which is actually, you know, as we. Let's go and get into it, when we started, I started watching this movie, Turn it on. And it's. It's. First of all, it's set in initially in Colombia. I don't remember the name of the city because it was neither Bogota nor Medan. And I don't know any other cities in Colombia.

Nic

Right.

Steve

From my very limited sort of education when it comes to South America. But it was somewhere in Colombia and we're at, I believe, a courthouse, right? And they're taking this. This group of armed men has taken over the courthouse and they've got hostages. And the first thing I notice is that it's in Spanish. And now I don't know if this is true of everybody's copy, but I did not have subtitles. There was no subtitles. And this was a lot of Spanish speaking. Yeah, I do not speak Spanish.

Nic

But.

Steve

I don't speak any Spanish. But I was still able to kind of follow what was going on a Because it's armed men taking over a courthouse. And really the gist of it is not hard to understand, but it seemed like they were using extra simple Spanish.

Nic

Okay.

Steve

Words.

Nic

I'm glad you brought it.

Steve

To try to make it more understandable, which I thought was an interesting choice.

Nic

Yeah, yeah. No, I love that. And this is flashing to later in the movie, but in. In the vein of the Spanish that seems like Spanish written for an American audience to not need subtitles. There's a scene where he's instructing the guys to fire upon a helicopter and he says, fuego. And I'm pretty sure they don't say that. Again, I don't know Spanish, but I really need to do some research. I thought that's something that I would say and be corrected by somebody who actually speaks Spanish.

Steve

Exactly. It sounds very much like. Because my wife Heather does actually speak a fair amount of Spanish. And so I said to her, hey, you know, what's the Spanish word for fire? And she said, fuego. I said, great, if you were instructing someone to shoot a cannon, would you tell them fuego? And she said, no. She didn't know off the top of her head what you would say, as she's never served in a Spanish speaking military outfit. But it was clear that this isn't the right thing. It seems it's very much in line with like Google Translate and just getting the exact literal translation of the word rather than having a Spanish speaker on staff to like, you know, actually help you understand. Well, this is what a group of Colombian criminals or cartel terrorists, whatever would be saying. Right. Yeah. As they talk to the. Clearly they didn't.

Nic

Minimal research.

Steve

Yeah. Daniel Petrie Jr. I would assume probably speaks about as much Spanish as I do. Yeah. Not much knows the word fuego, but yeah. I literally for a moment at the very beginning thought, was there something wrong with my copy? Is there something. Should. Should this be subtitled? But I guess it isn't normally. Right. Like.

Nic

Yeah, no. Well, I watched it off a dvd.

Steve

Right.

Nic

That I've owned for a long time. It's one of the first DVDs I bought, actually. Um. And yeah, no subtitles. And I think it just was. It did seem like this whole sequence at the beginning of the movie where they're really trying to establish the badness of the bad guys, which is just a classic. I love the different techniques that they use for that. Just to show how, oh, these guys mean business. Like we're going to be at a high school and stuff and there'll be Some jokes, but these guys are serious. And it really seemed like maybe that part was thrown in later because the rest of it wasn't working or something. But. Yeah, and it was interesting too, watching this, knowing that you hadn't seen it. Because I was thinking, how would I think of this through the eyes of somebody in 2025 who's witnessing this movie for the first time? So I looked at it a little bit differently this time. But yeah, that opening scene, very funny, very kind of low effort way to introduce the guys as being really, really bad.

Steve

Yeah. There's a concept in screenwriting and audience. I'll be mentioning this throughout the entirety of this podcast's existence because I at times have fancied myself somebody who wants to get into screenwriting. And there's a concept, as you learn a little bit about screenwriting called Save the Cat. And it's the idea that at the beginning of a movie, if you have a character save a cat from a tree or from whatever, from a pack of dogs or something, it tells everybody in the audience, this is a good person, this is a good character. Right. So have somebody save a cat. Right. I feel like the exact opposite of that is throw a woman out a window. Yeah. If you just throw a woman out a window, we know this is the bad guy. There's just. There's no equivocation. This isn't a Ed Harrison the Rock kind of is he good, is he bad, is he got good motives kind of situation. This is a bad guy.

Nic

Right.

Steve

There's no denying it. And so I think that was very effective. I will give them that.

Nic

And don't just show her falling out of the window. Make sure you show a hard zoom into her bloody face when she hits the ground. Again, another point about this movie that maybe we'll talk about is this seems like a PG13 movie that was trying really hard to get itself an R rating. And some scenes like that just were a bit out of place with a bit light heartedness elsewhere in the movie once we get into the actual plot.

Steve

Of this, for sure. Yeah. And on that topic, as I said, kind of equating this in my head before seeing it, just what little I knew about it, equating it with Iron Eagle and Red dawn and the Rescue. Iron Eagle and Red dawn are rated PG13. The rescue is a PG movie. And so I was very much in the mind that this was going to be that level of sort of the violence with like implied bloodshed perhaps, or. And of course that those hopes were dashed in the first Four minutes.

Nic

It's more in the Red dawn category where there's some even.

Steve

That, though, was PG 13. That was. Red dawn was the first. Okay, let's do a little bit of an aside here.

Nic

All right?

Steve

Dawn was the first PG13 movie ever because Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out with a PG rating because nobody ever said a swear word and nobody ever saw a gunshot create blood in that one. Right. That happens later in Last Crusade. But half the plot of the movie centers around this, like, cult of whatever worshipers that have. And they're pulling hearts out of people's chests and they're beating in front of their face, and it's horrific. And the MPAA was like, we might need something in between PG and R to sort of indicate a heightened sense of either, you know, dread or malice or something. And special effects that are getting better and better as this was, you know, in the early 80s. And so they created the PG13 rating because of Temple of Doom. But Red dawn was the first film to actually earn that particular MPAA content rating.

Nic

Very interesting. Very interesting.

Steve

But we're not talking about Red dawn today, I promise. We're talking about toy soldiers.

Nic

We might talk a little bit about Red Dawn. There are some corollaries.

Steve

It's true. Where do you want to take us here, Nic? This is your pick. I want to. I want to follow your lead.

Nic

Yeah. So I guess, you know, I would kind of call this a. It's like a movie in the fifth or sixth grade that one of your friends with divorced parents would tell you about. This is kind of a. It was my dad's weekend and he let me watch this movie kind of movie. Like, it's not. It's kids because it has kids in it. But it's not a youth appropriate movie at all.

Steve

Not remotely.

Nic

Yeah. So I guess getting into it, one thing that I really enjoyed. So we're in Colombia, we establish the bad guys equal bad. And then it goes right to this kind of whimsical scene of just some young rapscallions jogging around their boarding school. I love the score of this movie. I really enjoyed the music in this movie.

Steve

And.

Nic

And I was so confident when it was done. I'm like, I'm gonna look up that composer and he will have composed some of the best scores ever.

Steve

You thought it might be Howard Shore or something?

Nic

Yeah, exactly. I was like, oh, Danny Elfman working under a pseudonym here. And I looked it up. Robert Folk and his list of movies. It's like if you made a list of Joke movies to show that somebody was not good in the cinema world. It was like all the Police Academy movies. Ace Ventura 2, Van Wilder 2, all these things.

Steve

The rise of Taj.

Nic

I mean, he's really, he's really all over the place. But I will say I like the basic theme that they pick for this movie and how they, you know, alter it for the different emotions and stuff. But I really enjoy the score of this movie and I think that it sets the tone very well. So we see the kids cause them a little trouble, you know, as kids do, stealing an officer's nightstick and playing catch with it. And he's just like, hey, give it back, guys. I like that low level enforcement that they have at that school. So just moving the plot along. These terrorists here, the goal in Colombia, when they were speaking all the unsubtitled Spanish and throwing people out windows, the goal was that the main terrorist in the movie, Luis, Luis Cali, is trying to get his father released from prison for whatever reason. Probably not an Innocence Project type situation. My guess is he probably did something. But their plan, now that the judge in Columbia had already he was out of his powers to recall this guy from prison, they said, okay, well, the US Judge, we're gonna get to his son and we're gonna do something about that. But the feds are one step ahead of that. So he's been removed from the school.

Steve

Right.

Nic

Terrorists show up to the school and it's already a botched job from the beginning.

Steve

Yeah, I, I, can we pause for a second?

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

Can we call them terrorists? Like, I, I just, just let me throw it out there. I feel like this is a scenario where, okay, so I, I studied political science in college, actually took a class specifically on the politics of terrorism. And in my understanding, in the history of calling things terrorism, we've always expected there to be a desired change in a policy or you're trying to, you know, obviously like inflict dread on a populace, but you're doing it for political reasons. You want to take over to, you know, change the, the system of, of justice or government or whatever. Right. Of the group that you're trying to affect. These guys seem like a cartel. I mean, this, I would assume, Luis's daddy is a cartel head. Yeah. You know, and so I don't know if they just didn't feel like the word cartel was like part of the lexicon in 1991. You know, if this movie had been made in 2001, it feels very much like they would have just called them a Cartel, Sure. Right. So I found it just, like, distracting for. To be calling them terrorists, because I think back to Die Hard, which, of course, came out several years before this movie. And there they did it, right, Where Alan Rickman's gang is pretending to be terrorists to distract from the fact that they're simply thieves. And they're doing it right. Oh, we need to release these political prisoners and you need to do this. And all their demands are sort of based around, again, actual terrorism and trying to enact a political change. And these guys just seem like, no, no, no. Like, give me my daddy or I'll kill your kids. And I don't see how that's, like, obviously it terrorizes those families. Don't get me? But, like, actual terrorism, it seems like it's an inappropriate use of the term.

Nic

That's very interesting. You say that they were really hammering on the terrorist concept. And a big theme, overarching theme of this movie that they wanted the audience to walk away with is to know that the United States does not negotiate with terrorists. And I wonder now if it was one of those conditions that we'll let you borrow all these helicopters. So the siege scene looks cool, but you have to say terrorist 19 times in the movie. So, yeah, that's an interesting point. They weren't really going for an overarching goal. It was just a very specific thing.

Steve

Yeah, it seemed odd, I think. But again, that's something where I'm sure if I were to go back in time to the early 90s, that wouldn't have seemed odd at all. Right. To call these people terrorists would have seemed the correct thing to do.

Nic

Right, Right.

Steve

So you mentioned the kid.

Nic

Right.

Steve

So they're looking for this judge's kid, and he's already been removed from school. And what's that judge's kid's name?

Nic

It's. His last name is Donahue. They call him Phil, but I think that's the nickname that they're calling him Phil Donahue because in the credits, he's just listed as quotation mark Phil Donahue with no first name. So it's not like, oh, it's Charles, but they call him Phil. They're really leaving that. Very friendly.

Steve

I thought they were just naming him Phil Donahue. Like, the character was just legit named Phil Donahue. Why would you do that?

Nic

Like, originally, he was supposed to be played by the actual Phil Donahue, but he backed out at the last second.

Steve

He aged out a bit. So, yeah, that's okay. So I kind of know, just like their friend's name is Phil Bonnie. But I guess maybe it's sort of like in the movie Days of Confused when Randall Floyd's nickname is Pink because his friends call him Pink Floyd. Yeah, maybe it's that kind of a situation.

Nic

Exactly.

Steve

But yeah. Okay, well, that, that makes a little more sense than him actually being filled up.

Nic

No, that's that, you know, you never know. Things were crazy then. So. So Phil Donahue gets removed from school, right? The. The cartel shows up. Kelly's, Kelly's yet to be classified gang of bad guys shows up. We're not calling them terrorists from here on. And before they show up, when Phil leaves school, Billy Tepper, who's Sean Astin, the protagonist of the film, and his buddies who are all close friends with Phil Donahue, they need to go celebrate a little bit. Our buddy just got pulled out of school. We're going down into the basement and we're doing what boys do. We're hooking a homemade telephone type device directly into the phone line so that we can call phone sex for free. And we're going to drink a bunch of scope flavored vodka.

Steve

Right? Yeah, totally. I remember doing that several times as a kid, obviously, because I too. So actually that, that device, right, that he had, I don't know exactly what it's called, but it is used specifically by line operators of telephone companies to like do maintenance work and things. So 100,000% Billy stole that from someone. That's not something you can just buy at Radio Shack. You can't just walk in and get one of those. At least back then. There is no Radio Shack now. So. Yeah, so it's definitely. I think that's when he, when he tells the headmaster or whatever, the dean, you know, oh, I got this at Radio Shack. It's a joke because you can't just buy those. That's like having a lockpick.

Nic

Okay.

Steve

That's a device that, you know, you would be able to make free phone calls from anywhere just by touching a couple of phone wires. So, yeah, definitely, we're given the idea that Billy here is a bit of a miscreant.

Nic

So do you think in the world of the movie, Dean Parker is aware that is the, is this the thing that you can't get at Radio Shack in the world of the film?

Steve

Yes, because of the way he reacts when Billy says, I got it at like there's a little moment of like, screw you, Billy. Like, you're not going to tell me where you got it. I'm going to make you destroy it. So okay. But we both know you didn't get this shit at Radio Shack. Tune like.

Nic

So there's a big theme. Probably my favorite theme of the whole movie is Dean Parker, played by Louis Gossett Jr. Wonderful from the beginning, loves Billy. Shit. He loves, he, he loves his mischief. And he cannot help but enjoy everything that he does.

Steve

Hints at one point even that he did much the same. That he went to Saint Regis, the Regis School or whatever when he was young. And that he was very much the same way.

Nic

Yeah. And. And there's a lot of very explicit.

Steve

I believe you.

Nic

Which is kind of funny now that you bring up the Radio Shack thing. Cause I, I don't know about this stuff. I was just watching thinking like, man, I wish there was a Radio Shack here. I hate paying for phone calls.

Steve

Yeah. I was looking at going, where did he get one of those like line operator dealies? You can't just pick those up at Radio Shack. And then he said, I'll go to Radio Shack. I was like, okay, the movie's reading my mind.

Nic

So Billy's cat, they're caught in the basement. So the boys are in the basement. Dean Parker, wisest guy, he knows exactly what's going on. He knows exactly who's involved. And he comes down and busts up the kids. The punishment for Billy is he has to go recall all these bottles of Scope flavored vodka that he sold to the boys in the dorms. And then he's stuck on pots and pans, washing pots and pans for a year. And for some reason he's more mad at this than anything. And he wakes his friends up.

Steve

Is that like the pots and pans.

Nic

I think they said, for the rest of the year.

Steve

Wow.

Nic

He wakes his friends up and he says we have to do something. We have to get back at him.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

And the plan to get back at him. Very difficult to believe that a bunch of 16 year old kids who can't click clearly even clean their own dorm room can perfectly move and rearrange. Very heavy, very old wooden furniture.

Steve

Antique, really big oaken desks. A 300 pound desk.

Nic

Easily those things that you just have to build a building around because you can't move it. And they take one of the other, I guess the headmaster. The headmaster and the dean are different guy. So this guy played by Denholm Elliot, who we all love from Trading Places and the Indiana Jones films, like yeah, yeah, yeah. So they set his furniture up outside as the Prank. And when the teachers are talking to each other, you could tell that they're trying not to laugh. They mentioned they're trying not to laugh. They love it. Billy showing his defiance when he's called out for it does probably the most offensive thing you can ever do. Throw a banana peel away in a trash can that's set up outside.

Steve

How dare you, Billy.

Nic

And Lou Gosset just. His delivery of this line is so funny. And it gets dropped around my house all the time because we like this movie. His pick up that banana. He's just never been more incensed in his life than like, you threw trash into a trash can. That trash can's not supposed to be here.

Steve

Shaking with rage.

Nic

Louis Gossett Jr. Is, but he still loves his shit.

Steve

And so that's a funny part. I realized a little as the movie is going on and I'm not going to jump ahead plot wise so much. But I just want to mention, as I said earlier, this sort of sub genre of films like Iron Eagle was my. That was my jam. That was the one that I watched, you know, so often. And he. And Louis GODIN jr. Is in that as well. He is the. He plays Colonel Chappie S. Chappie Sinclair. He's this Air Force, supposedly retired, you know, colonel pilot. And he helps the kids with what they need to figure out to go rescue the one kid's dad. And really it's the same thing. It's a bunch of, you know, it's a bunch of kind of fuckups like whatever these kids that like, you know, are. Are miscreants and, and, and doing whatever they want. And then this guy who's ostensibly an authority figure and a. In a respectable sort of position who just loves the crap they're getting into and is just all in on it. And, and he really, you know, basically the dean in this movie is if Chappie Sinclair had just never actually been in the Air Force.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

If he just not actually gone for. Maybe hadn't gone career and on rage, rise to the rank of colonel. If he would have just, you know, done a tour and then gone about his life, maybe he would have become dean of the Regis School. But they're very similar characters. Not. No, no. Denigration to Louis Costa Jr. He knows his style and he. He nails it.

Nic

He does. He's got a type.

Steve

It really is. It really is. He's easily one of the best parts of this movie.

Nic

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And so Billy's in trouble now. He's in big trouble. Kids are in trouble. Phil Donahue is out of here and Louis Cali and his Gang are on their way to the school. They arrive at the school and this is something where I feel like. I don't know if it was edited out of order or something odd. So essentially they're going to the school to kidnap Phil Donahue to put pressure on his father so that Luis's father will be released. In my mind, that's something you just go and you do and you leave. But before they even start looking for this guy, they're setting up machine guns on the towers, they're setting up a perimeter and all this stuff that just seems extremely unnecessary if they didn't already know it was going to go badly.

Steve

Yeah. It seems like what you'd think. Think or what they even kind of tell us. Right. Is a kidnapping really was always intended to be. Yeah. Like a hostage taking, sort of anti siege situation. And it just, I think, goes to show that that group is just not a particularly talented. Like, this is not the A team. I understand that. It's the boss's son. This is like the Nepo team. This is like the real cartel. Hit squads and wetwork squads are out there doing cartel business throughout the world. These guys are like, we're going to get daddy back. And they're just inept. They're just completely inept.

Nic

Definitely. It's the Chet Hanks squad going out there. Yeah. And they rigged the whole school to explode. All these things that are completely unnecessary until you find out that the kidnapping is botched. Exactly. All that aside, they get there and they realize Phil Donahue is gone. What are we gonna do? We have a problem. Fifteen seconds later, one of the guys says, hey, I don't think we have a problem. Check this out. And then he brings out a bunch of manila folders which are things that every school has where it'll have your photo, your name, and then list why your parents are important.

Steve

Right? Yes. Classic.

Nic

So. So everyone's folder. So they find out this school is full of kids who are sons of. Of high ranking bankers and senators and. And politicians and lawyers and. Yeah. Contractors. And then. And then Joseph Trotta, played by Will Wheaton, is the son of one of the mob bosses of New York City. So they're a little bit like. He's kind of. He's kind of with us.

Steve

Right. New Jersey, actually. They make it clear that he's essentially Tony Soprano before. Okay, I gotta pause you for a second because I gotta talk about Wil Wheaton. So I love Wil Wheaton. I was a huge Star Trek Next Generation fan. I think Wil Wheaton's great. His accent in this movie is so ludicrous. Crazy. Just the most sporadic. Well, right. First of all, it comes and goes as it pleases, but when it is there, it is the most, like, community theater bullshit Jersey accent ever that I've ever heard. And he's a good actor. Like. And here's the thing. I know how online will is. If you end up hearing this well, I think you're great. This wasn't. And that's okay. You know, you were a teenager. Like, I get it.

Nic

It's like Michael Scott at his improv class doing an Italian guy accent type accent. These guys gonna fucking do the. It was just. And it would be one thing if he stayed that way the whole time, but he also didn't have anything that would suggest a guido type appearance. You know, he was dressed exactly like the Steve Buscemi. Like, hey, what's up, fellow kids? Like everyone else was in that movie. But there was nothing mobbish about the way he looks.

Steve

Except for. And we can just do. Is that the left ear earring. And two characters had it because Billy had one and Joey has one. But Joey's hangs. Yeah, right. Billy just had the stud, but a hanging one. That was very Bon Jovi. That felt very kind of like, this guy's a little different. This guy's a little cooler, maybe a.

Nic

Little flashier than us.

Steve

Maybe his dad's a mobster. You know, it could be. So I think that was our indicator. Right. That he was from, you know, not the wrong side of the tracks in a. In a socioeconomic standpoint, but, you know, from more of a moral compass standpoint. But we are also told immediately, of course. Right. That Joey despises his father.

Nic

Right, right. He's nothing like me, you know, so that's going to come up a little later.

Steve

When.

Nic

So they. They get the school lockdown. And the plan is, we've got our kids. We've got 92 students. We're going to do a count every hour. If somebody's missing, we're going to start executing the kids.

Steve

Five, I think. Right. For every student.

Nic

That's right. Seems like very. They're. They're aggressive. Not good at being terrorists. Bad. They did a bad job running the numbers. I mean, these are not the negotiating points that you start with. It really killed me when Louise Calli is having Denholm, Elliot, the headmaster, talk to the authorities. So when he's finally talking to the authorities because he seems so dismissive of everything, he's not like, you have to do something. He's coming here to blow us up. He's like, oh, yes. He has a bomb attached to his wrist. And he says, it'll blow us up. And he's, like, waving his hands. Oh, whatever this guy says, I think that's very funny because it just adds to the. The character of Luis Cali as somebody who. Things started off going wrong for him and he's just getting no respect at any turn and just slowly, like, melting down more and more and more and just making terrible decisions.

Steve

Yeah. I think it's just that big, that much more of an indicator, you know, that he is sort of the Nepo baby, the fail son. Right. And not. Not really a leader in his own right within this organization. He is a leader because his dad is the leader.

Nic

Right.

Steve

And that's an interesting thing. I don't think that the movie really explores as much as it could have, but. But it's interesting. Can we take a break just for a minute on that and talk about. You kind of hinted at it early. Where do I know that guy from?

Nic

Yes.

Steve

Right. There's so much of that.

Nic

So many of these guys.

Steve

So I've got a couple. So one of the ones that I wanted to mention is Snuffy, our buddy. Snuffy. Right. Who's one of the five main boys, Billy and Joey's friends. I immediately recognized him from two movies that both have to do with babysitters. Interestingly enough, as he is both in Adventures in Babysitting and Don't Tell mom, the babysitter's dead. He has the very famous line that gets repeated around my house for some reason all the time, which is, the dishes are done, man.

Nic

Absolutely.

Steve

Keith Coogan, among many other things. I'm not saying that's all Keith Coogan did, but it was just something that jumped out at me as soon as I recognized him.

Nic

Yeah. So we had Keith Coogan. We had Will Wheaton.

Steve

Right.

Nic

When we get to the side of the authorities. Oh, my gosh. So they're in the school and the authorities have gathered. The local cops have proven themselves to be useless, as is always the case in these movies where the FBI has to. Who's in charge here? Me. Not anymore. This is my crime scene kind of stuff. And then the two in charge, the head FBI guy is played by Mason Adams, who we know from Christmas vacation.

Steve

Yep.

Nic

We know him from a million things.

Steve

I think son in law is the thing that comes to mind.

Nic

My wife was saying that there's a Pauly Shore triangle in this movie because Mason Adams was with Pauly Shore and Son in Law. And then Sean Astin was with Pauly Shore and Encino Man. So we're wondering if the Wheeze might have been an executive producer behind the scenes on this one. So Mason Adams, he's the FBI guy and he's the take no guff, old guy character. And just in case there wasn't enough of that guy, we have the, the main military contact who's played by Arleigh Ermey, the classic drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket and everything else. And it's very funny that we have two heads of these very high ranking agencies and then just some principal who's allowed to stand there and look at the maps with them. So they're going through their top secret plans and everything. And they don't mind that Lou Gossett is sitting there saying, you know, there used to be a basement under here. They just let him right in. And that's very characteristic of our military and law enforcement is they're just like, hey, you know what, if you can help, come on in.

Steve

Right?

Nic

Come on, sit in on the meeting.

Steve

It's all open, sunshine, laws, right? Everything's great, come on in. He begins to basically play the Sean Connery in the rock type role without ever actually having sir. You know, it's that kind of thing. It feels like a lot of ways. I have a couple others I want to mention.

Nic

So.

Steve

Yeah, Louis Kali in particular, actually, I'll save him to last his second in command. I can't remember the name of this backup.

Nic

He's the white guy.

Steve

He's the only white guy. The only, like American. He doesn't have an accent, he doesn't speak Spanish, wears glasses. He was in Beverly Hills Cop, right. As one of the henchmen, basically. And he was in Total Recall.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

And that was the thing I think I really grabbed from. And it was just so funny to like see that and think like, oh man, this guy's playing this same guy. He's got a villain's look to him, clearly, because in that, you know, mid-80s to early 90s era, he was just constantly playing bad guys, but never, never the big bad guy, I guess always sort of the henchman or the right hand man, or he's like a.

Nic

He's like a white Al Leong, okay. You know, Al Leong, that, that great henchman, that Asian guy with kind of balding long hair, with a facial hair. And he's probably been killed by Arnie Stallone and Mel Gibson and like every movie, every action star. Yeah, the Thing about this character, too, is, I think in Total Recall, it's almost as if he just walked off the set of Toy Soldiers and into Total Recall with the same look. They didn't.

Steve

The glasses, everything.

Nic

No wig or anything like. Yeah, that's. That's your look, buddy.

Steve

Go for it, man. And the last one I'm going to bring up is Luis Kali himself in both Air Force One, featuring Harrison Ford. Great movie. And on one of my favorite things in the world, the USA action drama Burn Notice, featuring, among other people, Bruce Campbell. He plays Russians, so he's he himself. I don't know if the actor, what nationality, ethnicity, background the actor has, but he doesn't come off as a Latino in this movie at all. The. When he plays Russian bad guys, it's much more believable.

Nic

His name is. It's Andrew Diva. D I V O F F. I.

Steve

Believe that sounds Eastern European.

Nic

Sounds definitely more Russian.

Steve

So interesting choice to cast him here as if there was, you know, as was Edward James, almost not available. Like, I mean, there's got to be people, actual Latino actors, who could have played this role and done a much more convincing job of speaking Spanish and probably would have known on set, hey, guys, we don't say fuego. Yeah, that's not what we would say. You know, you just need one person.

Nic

There to call that out and say.

Steve

Any native Spanish speaker in the room would have told them something different. But anyway, I just thought it was funny that it's like, yeah, this guy, he's much more convincing as a Russian baddie than a Latino baddie.

Nic

Yeah, absolutely. Non Latino. Main guy there, Andrew Divoff, Great actor. I think in some things, he's like. He serves his purpose as the bad guy. The command center. They're getting together and they're talking about what's going on. And Lou Gosset's Dean Parker is breaking it down to them. He's like, this school is full of boys that have been kicked out of other schools, and they have attitude problems and aversion to authority and stuff.

Steve

Right.

Nic

One of the best lines is, like, there's one boy in particular, and he kind of looks off into space just to show you that there's something special about Billy Tepper, about Sean Astin's character, that he might do something. I'm thinking that he's probably not going to just pee his pants like everyone else would in that situation. He's going to step up.

Steve

Yeah. And I think we see that early. Like, not only is he the ringleader, right. For A lot of the shenanigans and this kind of the bad stuff that the kids get into. But he is a very loyal friend. Right. Like as when. When the. When Louis Scali and his and his bad guy buddies decide we're gonna shift gears and we're going to look at who else we have here to, you know, hold hostage and. And you know, whatever. They start going around and asking everybody and they get to the friend of. What was his name, the friend?

Nic

Ricardo.

Steve

Ricardo. They get to Ricardo.

Nic

I just call him A.C. slater.

Steve

He does look a lot like A.C. sL. Later they get to Ricardo and they ask him like, do you speak Spanish? And he says no, not really. Or something like that. But then of course he hears Spanish and responds and. And so they smack him in the side of his knee so hard that he drops the ground. I mean, I think there's a crunch noise, obviously, you know, sound effect, but like a crunch noise, he drops the floor and Billy jumps. Hey, don't do that. You know, whatever. And it's a great exchange and it sort of gives us a little insight to Billy's character. But Ricardo doesn't have a bruise. He doesn't have his knee hurt. He doesn't limp.

Nic

No.

Steve

And we would have seen a bruise, by the way, because at some point, if you want to, we can talk about how often there are teenage boys in their underwear in this movie just hanging out with each other, but no bruises. How do you take a devastating blow to the side of the knee and not have any ramifications? I don't actually expect an answer. I just thought.

Nic

I think Billy sticking up for him made him heal faster.

Steve

That's possible. Billy is magic. Clearly.

Nic

Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, boxers, boxer briefs, pajama pants, not very popular in that era. A lot of tighty whities and hanging out and wasn't weird back then, I guess, because whatever. But watching it, it is a little bit like, hey, man, they just moved you from two person rooms to now six in a room. And wouldn't that be more close time?

Steve

Right. Well, some seem like that would be. And I don't know, maybe that's just the difference in the era. This is the time of period where the fashions for men, young men included, you know, crop top football jerseys that said Hawaii on them, you know what I mean? That were cut at the.

Nic

Absolutely.

Steve

Upper navel, above the navel. So yeah, it's just a different time.

Nic

Clothes were built like half so that they would look good on a girl that was wearing Your shirt home the next morning. You know, that's smart. They're like, walk of shame friendly.

Steve

There's that.

Nic

I had a note here about the henchmen, okay. And I referred to all of the henchmen aside from Louise Cali and then the American guy that's with him as machine gun slobs. They're all so unkempt and just unaware and everything about them is gross. And I mean, it's a technique to make them less, you know, more vile and everything. But it's very funny that this well trained militia is all sitting there with their gut pouring out of their dirty wife beater that's coming out of their unbuttoned shirt.

Steve

Oh, my God. Well, and yeah, they've like food everywhere. Their little station aren't very mapped. It's like if you needed to immediately fire this enormous, you know, belt fed machine gun, would you be able to or would you have to move your Cokes out of the way, you know.

Nic

Before you do it?

Steve

It's a little. It does seem less than ideal as far as, you know, military precision goes. And again, these are terrorist, cartel, whatever. They're not, they're not organized military. Right, Clearly.

Nic

Right. And you know, the authorities, the, the parents have found out now, so the kids are being held hostage at the school. Anyone who approaches the school is going to be fired upon. There's some communication. They're going to be killing hostages. And there's this big kind of town hall meeting with all the parents which involves the authorities who definitely do their job to calm the parents down. And I'm going to quote, I wrote a quote down that, you know, Mason Adams, the FBI director, said one of the parents made a comment about my son has been kidnapped. He says, your sons haven't been kidnapped. They're being held hostage by a gang of terrorists. I mean, what are you doing, man? To the parents, that's like, oh, no, no, no, no, don't feel bad. Your dog isn't sick. Your dog is dead. I mean, it's such a horrific.

Steve

In the words, in the words of the Dude. You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole, man. Like. Yeah, what is it like Futurama? You're technically correct. The best kind of correct. Yeah, technically he's not wrong. Congratulations. Parsing, you know, splitting hairs in your, in your syntax when it comes to whether they're hostage, taken hostage or kidnapped, but not so much when it's are these terrorists or just criminals? Right, that. Who gives a. That doesn't matter. Yeah.

Nic

Again, Pushing the terrorist angle, though. The parents were suggesting kidnappers. And he's saying, no, no, no, we need to reiterate. These are terrorists.

Steve

Oh, my God. Yeah. So, yeah. So when the, you know, we've got. The FBI has shown up, the army has shown up, everybody kind of knows they're there and the kids devise a plan. Right. And the key is that they've got. So they're collecting all this information. And I mean, my God, Joey is the greatest artist to ever live on. Unbelievable. Like, he. He puts every photo realist. Yeah. Every police sketch artist to shame. Joey puts. Because he's just incredible. He's got really detailed drawings of all of the terrorists. Whatever. Hey, I'm drawing here. Yeah, right. And then they've, like, taken, I guess like a yearbook or something that has like a. I mean, I guess looks like a drone. Before there were drone photographs, but like a big kind of aerial photograph of the buildings. And they've marked where the sniper nests and machine gun nests are. And that's awesome. But they got to get it to the good guys somehow.

Nic

They do.

Steve

And so. Sorry, I have to back up for a second because I just realized, like, when we first see the, like, attempt at a plan or whatever, the FBI has a map of the grounds that I swear to God looks like Jay and Silent Bob's map of the mall and stage in Mall Rats. It looks like it's made out of crayon. Like, there's stick figures on it. Like, I don't get, like, how it could be that amateurish. But aside, I wanted to say. So just like, if I haven't hinted at it yet, you know, this was not my favorite movie in that I've ever seen. We'll get to, like, actual ratings of the end. But I will say an incredibly exciting, tense, amazing sequence that was probably the best the movie had to give us was the whole thing of Billy getting out with the information the kids have collected to give to the authorities. And then, of course, he's now been caught by the military guys and they don't want. They're not going to let him go back. Yeah. He has to get back in time so that he can be counted and they don't kill anybody else. Yeah. And the whole sequence from him stealing a Humvee and the Humvee chase and then he gets soaking wet and you wonder, what's he gonna do? And he's like. And they're cutting back and forth between the, like, the kids in the play, you know, the playground, whatever, the courtyard and Then to him, and then the kids are now in the mess hall. And now back to Billy. And now the kids are being counted. And now back. And. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, awesome. Everything from the moment he jumps in that Humvee for the next, like, five minutes, I was literally like. I don't know that I took more than two breaths that whole time. Yeah, it was impressive. It was really the movie at its best. If they could somehow have bottled that sort of tension and that intensity and somehow applied it to anything else that happens in the movie, because there really isn't enough tension for most of.

Nic

No, I was incredible. And that is a great scene. And I think even within. I love just the timing of I have to kick the soccer ball through the window at the same time that he's doing this and all. And then Billy's ingenuity to get the towel, like, I'm all wet.

Steve

What am I doing?

Nic

Stuff. But even within this scene of true intensity and real suspense, moving the action along, there was some of the classic ridiculousness that I love this movie for, which is when the American terrorist is going through and making sure that all the kids are counted. And I keep coming up with 91. And I keep coming up with 91. One of the counts. He's going through 85, 86. Get back in line. I already counted you.

Steve

Right.

Nic

And the person who decided to step in line, which is a good strategy, and I definitely think that that's what you do. But I would not have nominated Billy's friend Henry Guys iii, who happens to be, I think, the only African American student at this school.

Steve

One, two. We saw one other near the end, but, yes, one of two in the school of 90 children or something. Or not. Whatever's 91, 92.

Nic

I love the optimism, and I love them giving these terrorists credit and being like, you know what? He's not racist. I think he just sees me as another kid. But it did seem like strategically a very bad move for him to be the guy or all the other white kids are assholes because nobody else thought to do it.

Steve

I mean, I think that's really what we're just meant to believe is that he thought of it himself. He thought, I'm going to try this and just do it. I don't think there was a plan ahead of time because. Because this was not a contingency. I think they assumed they would need to deal with right into that level. They thought Billy would be back. They had everything else planned out to a T. I mean, if Billy had not been. If Billy had been able to hand that dossier that they created to those streamers, whatever, so ridiculous looking, and then run back. That all would have worked. It would have worked perfectly fine. So their plan was not terrible. Let's talk for a second about a plan that was terrible, which is when Joey, whose dad played by Detective Briscoe from Law and Order, he is going to try, they're going to try to work with the cartel, is going to work with him to get Joey out because they don't want to piss off Joey's dad because he's a mob boss. It's a big deal right there. Big customers and a big customer, I think, for their drug smuggling operations like that. Joey doesn't want to leave. So what does Joey do? Joey comes up with the idea to elbow the terrorist, walking him down the hallway in the face and take his machine gun. Okay. Clearly he's never fired him any kind of, probably any kind of weapon, but certainly not any kind of automatic weapon in his life. And so when that happened, I was thinking to myself, oh my God, are they really gonna make Joey this like Superman hero who's gonna go out into the courtyard and just like literally like headshot, Headshot, you know?

Nic

No, no, no, no. He gets murked immediately.

Steve

Just, just. Oh my God, he's trying to shoot. He is shooting at a target 30ft away from him, give or take. But the recoil on that gun is so strong and so hard. And again, I have never fired an automatic weapon, so I'm assum accurate. He can't keep it straight. He can't, oh yeah, aim at his target because the recoil is so hard and it's just raising the muzzle of the gun up and. And so then he is destroyed and blown away in self defense, I guess. Technically, yeah.

Nic

I mean, honestly, at that point you really can't blame the machine gun slobs for firing upon Joey when they see him bust out there. Yeah. So Joey comes out blasting. He gets killed.

Steve

Yes.

Nic

And then there's a scene of the boys, the friends who just had to witness this really like in terror. And oh, they finally run over to his body, right? And they're all surrounding him for like 10 seconds until 1 of the machine gun slobs comes over and finally kicks away the machine gun that's just laying next to him. This loaded machine gun that's next to the dead body. Bad move by Joey. And I feel like if he was really rejected, his father and everything that his father stood for. I don't know, I mean, I guess you don't want to get rescued because of who your dad is. But also machine gun stuff. That's. That's your dad's kind of there. Stealing a machine gun. That's some. I think Albert Trotta.

Steve

Right. I think he just had, you know, he had Rambo syndrome. Right. We know what it was like to be kids that age. I've never liked guns. I still played army men running around in friends backyards in the 80s and 90s, you know, pretending to be the hero. I think that's what he was doing. And then the problem is in, you know, as anybody who thinks that that's what reality is like, finds out real quick it's not real consequences. And real consequences indeed.

Nic

So we lost a great artist.

Steve

That's right. The best pencil sketch artist in the Regis School history, I believe. I don't think anybody would measure up to Joey Trotta, by the way. For some reason I kept thinking his last name was Trotter because that's what it sounded like. But then I looked it up and it's like, oh, it's Trotta. Okay, sure, I guess.

Nic

Yeah. You can't. You have to be clear when. Especially when someone's speaking with an accent like that. Because he would say Trotter the same way.

Steve

He would say the same way, exactly. Yeah.

Nic

Okay, so now Joey's dead. Louis Callie is losing his shit. Everything's going terribly for him. And there's a very somber scene where Dean Parker is walking up to the school with his sleeves rolled up, showing that he's no threat with the EMTs and everything.

Steve

Right?

Nic

And he says Louis Cali has to remind him that, oh, tell them I never wanted to kill this boy. And Lou, gossip wouldn't happen if you weren't here in the first place. It wouldn't have happened if the US government. He just. You gave. I don't even know what he said, but he was just really like. It's exactly how somebody reacts when they have nothing to say. And he was just absolutely flipping out. And I think he could tell things are about over for him.

Steve

Yeah, he's scared shitless. I think he says it twice. Tell the. Tell him we did not intend to kill this boy. It was an accident. Tell him it was an accident. It's like Detective Briscoe's not going to care, man. No, he's not going to care. Absolutely not. He said he loves his son even though his son hates him. He loves his son. We heard that earlier. He's not going to care.

Nic

So what's the consequence here is that when Luis Cali's father is being transferred in the prison, you know, we got some connections on the inside. Joey Trotta's father and the Mafia family have some connections on the inside. Louis C's father's classic throat cut thrown over the second balcony of that jail.

Steve

Looks like they. They set a riot in. In. In motion. So that it would be in the confusion, nobody would know who or how he died or whatever, who killed him. So a riot is going on. He comes out of his cell, which is, by the way, ever. Any movie I've ever seen has taught me if there's ever a prison riot going on, insane yourself.

Nic

Close it again.

Steve

Try to close it. If you can hold, pull it closed. Go for it. They may not. They may be some kind of mechanism that doesn't allow that. But stay. If you can get underneath your. Your mattress. Yeah. You know, between the boxes, whatever little spring or a little cot in the mattress. Hide. Don't. Don't get involved. Especially if you're the leader of a Colombian cartel. Yeah.

Nic

So there.

Steve

So now he's dead, and now the authorities have to worry about Luis finding out. Right. That his father is dead. So what do they do?

Nic

Cut the power.

Steve

That's right.

Nic

And the tv, it was kind of funny because, you know, in this era, in 1991, you have a couple of main TV networks, and it seemed like Luis Cali was getting a lot of his updates from the outside world by just flicking on the TV and hoping that there'd be some kind of national report on this thing that they're kind of not supposed to make a big public deal out of.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

So, yeah, it turns out, oh, the power's out, and. And whatever. And he's like, you have one hour to get the power back on or we kill five hostages. He's very. He really wants to kill some hostage, does he?

Steve

Because when Billy's late getting back to the head count, it sounds like they count three or four times.

Nic

That's true.

Steve

And so it sounds to me like they are really trying hard not to kill any of these kids, because they even take their time. They don't just plunk, plunk, plunk. They go, line up over here. You go over here. Okay. And then Billy Wright runs in and sort of everything works out. And of course, then there's barely any. I mean, he gets whipped or something, but it's not like there's a real punishment for the group, Right. That somebody was so late. So there's a lot of empty threats. Being. I mean, now they. You know, they have killed people. I'm not saying they're not killers, but there feels like there were a lot of opportunities for Luis and his gang to kill more people. Yeah. And they would have been, in their worldview, justified in doing so. Right. Because. Oh, well, a threat was made.

Nic

They made the terms. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. So maybe Luis just wanted to puff his chest up and show his dad what a big shot he is without after it. Just having to actually do something.

Steve

It fits the fail son. Nepo, baby, this is Don Jr. We're talking about. This is. He's trying anything to get Daddy's approval. Yeah. So the.

Nic

The gang on the outside realizes time is running out. Time is short. He's going to find out at some point that his father's been killed.

Steve

Right.

Nic

So what do we have to do? Mason Adams, the FDA FBI director, says, we've been given the go ahead to negotiate. Let's end this thing.

Steve

Which is like, okay, which.

Nic

You should maybe do that first, if that's on the list.

Steve

Right.

Nic

And then Arleigh Ermey, responding on behalf of the. The U.S. military Industrial Complex, says.

Steve

We.

Nic

Have a shot at a successful assault here.

Steve

Successful assault.

Nic

And then they ask him, can you guarantee no civilian casualties? And he's so dismissive. He's like, no, what the. What is wrong with you? Of course we're going to kill a bunch of people. I said, assault?

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

But he was so excited about getting to use all that stuff. Stuff?

Steve

Oh, yeah, we got all those helicopters ready to go, obviously several Humvees that have not yet been crashed.

Nic

So they brought in a ton. There was a lot of this movie where it was kind of. Not a lot of. Not a lot of budget being utilized during the middle of the movie. And then as we get towards the assault at the end. Okay, here we go. The kids had counted 12 terrorists, something like that, in Luis's squad. I think about 90 SWAT members, plus four or five helicopters and whatever other support they had were sent on the school. And they weren't doing that well against these guys. They were pretty unsuccessful.

Steve

Let's talk for a second about this assault team. Two things that came really struck me, right, was that there's a large sort of aerial shot kind of above the lawn in front of the school as the helicopters land. And, you know, these assault guys get out, and at least one of them, as he's sprinting across the grass, just slips and falls. Just falls on his face and has to get up and keep running. And I'm like, okay. And then it's like a couple of them just immediately get, you know, like blown up. Like a grenade rolls a machine gun slob.

Nic

Right.

Steve

Rolls a grenade off the roof and it blows up near a couple of guys. Kills and kills two of them, injures the other one, whatever. To me this looked like. These guys look like the SWAT team assaulting the Griswolds house at the end of Christmas vacation. This was not a well oiled machine. This was not. Again, we're not. This is a movie full of the B team.

Nic

It's the Nepo SWAT team. Yeah, it's the.

Steve

Apparently Arlie Ermey and Mason Adams are actually brothers. And this is like they're the failsons of their world or something. Like whatever. Because this team is terrible.

Nic

Yeah. They did a lot of moves that I think look cool. In the context of a long sequence of showing the SWAT team approach the school. But in real life make zero sense. Like every third guy would just dive down onto the ground and take some position where everyone's on the roof or inside. Like I don't know what you're doing from just being laying on the grass.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

But they did a lot of cool looking. Not quite to the level of the. The Blues Brothers, the hut, hut, hut, hut. They weren't making those kind of cool sounds, which I would have liked.

Steve

But I think actually the SWAT team at the end of Christmas vacation does something like that, which is bad. But yeah, I feel like it sound, you know, it felt a little bit like the song is Harold Ramis and Bill Murray's crew from Stripes trying to, you know, infiltrate the Russian border. And it's very haphazard.

Nic

Yeah. So as the SWAT team is being sent in. So all the military resources that we have, like I said 60 guys, 70 guys, helicopters, machine guns, uniforms, they're all in their black, they have their tactical gear. Dean Parker, still with his tie on, let me go in. I know my way around there. He's trying to get in there. We're trying to. Lou Goss is trying to talk himself into being part of the assault. It's like somebody saying, give me a gun. Right. It's crazy. And they don't let him go in. And he just decides, to hell with this, I know my way in. And when he pops into that drainage pipe to show that, oh, Luigi's heading to the school right now, that's when. That's when it gets really exciting at the end because you know, they're going to need his help.

Steve

They're going to.

Nic

You can't do it without a principal.

Steve

Yeah, so. And we should mention, right, the. The feasibility of the assault almost entirely hinges on the kids being able to replace some transmitters in a. In the bomb detonation machinery, whatever. I don't know. The detonator, I guess it's called, and like a model airplane sort of. Sort of drone kind of thing that one of the. One of the younger kids had Yogurt. Yogurt, yeah. And so we got to get. And so I don't know enough about RF technology to be totally honest with you, but I feel like somebody should have read this part of the script and gone. Guys, you got to come up with something else. You got to come with something a little more realistic.

Nic

Do you think that early in the movie you were talking about the sophisticated kind of phone tapping type equipment that he had? Was that set up to establish the fact that Billy might have a little bit more technical knowledge than the average high school student?

Steve

Maybe. But if that's what there's. Was their intention, they sort of threw that into the. At the end of the movie when he needed Yogurt to come with him to hang from the top and go, no, no, the red one. There is no red one. Well, the blue one then. Like, okay, like. So, yeah, it's why that kid has, you know, Unless, I guess, if they looked at his dossier, it's like, oh, your dad's Steve Jobs. Yeah. You know, but like, I don't know why he was so smart. But, yeah, it was just a weird thing. And look, it all worked out. Don't get me wrong, they rewired the thing and it did what they wanted them, saved everybody. But I just don't quite understand how that could have worked.

Nic

Yeah, it hinged on a lot, but it led to an extremely satisfying final look of melting down from Luis Cali. So the siege is happening, and he's managed. Oh, okay, I got to go back to. So Billy and Yogurt go up into the vents, and their goal is to get to the dean's office where the receiver for the bomb and the remote control plane are. They're gonna switch the chips out while they're in there. They instruct one of their other friends, leave the sink running. If the sink's running, we know that it's okay for us to come back in. He's in there with the sink running for a while. One of the machine gun slobs walks into the bathroom. All of a sudden he can't really stand there with the sink running. He turns it off and gets out of there. So now the machine gun Slav is in there washing his fist. This killed me because when it shows him washing, all he's doing is just holding a closed fist, washing it. And I know that that was the director being like, we need to make this guy look tougher. What if instead of washing his hands, he's washing his face? Fist.

Steve

Yeah. Because washing your hands, that's like a wuss move.

Nic

I know.

Steve

You know, what are you going to do?

Nic

What are you going to do things or type something? I mean, wash your fist, man.

Steve

What are you preparing food for the masses.

Nic

So. So they were able to subdue the fist washer, even though he caught them coming out of the vent. They were able to subdue them. And then Billy got caught by Luis Cali.

Steve

Yep.

Nic

He. He was behind the door. He thought he was slick, and Luis got him. Yeah. So now he's being held hostage by Luis Cali as they're backing into that. The dean's office. And he's got no choices left.

Steve

Right, Right.

Nic

So Luis Cali is trying to blow them up. He realizes that there's an assault going, and he pushes the button on his little garage door opener. Little, Little plane takes off. And this look of. He turns Billy towards him and just gives him a scream to his face. That absolutely killed me because it was almost like him sharing this human moment with someone he was trying to kill just in a desperate way to reach out and say, can you believe the shit that's happening to me today? I just wanted my daddy. I like the way he reacts to that. It's so great.

Steve

Yeah, but that's it. Basically, Louis Costa Jr. Comes flying through the window and they kill Luis.

Nic

And I mean, yeah, great practical effect. Great fake head to have the bullet go through. I thought that looked nice. He had, like, a full third of a skull added on with prosthetics to make that work. Yeah. So they saved the day. I do love just the little actions of the bomb squad guys when the main bomb squad. First of all, they have not evacuated the area at all. Dean Parker has been shot, and he's just wrapped in gauze on the outside of his shirt. In various places he's been treated. But then they're still sitting outside of where the bomb is. Everyone's lingering around. And then the bomb squad guy comes out holding the bomb like it's a birthday cake. And he's just looking down, shaking his head like, oh, man, what is this world coming to these days? I think you'd leave that there until you got everybody out of the area. But again, you know, it's not a documentary.

Steve

No, it's not. And I'm not on a bomb squad, so maybe that's protocol. Doesn't feel like it should be. Yeah. Speaking of Dean Parker's injury there at the end that the gunshot wound when he was first shot and where the squib first, you know, burst out of his shirt to show us he's been shot. Everything. I thought he'd been shot right in the heart. I mean, it really was sort of like that left upper chest area. I guess it they were indicating was more of like a shoulder thing that he didn't really have. Like, you know, because they did not take that seriously. It seemed like there's a little bit of a gauze wrapping and he was just walking around and using the arm.

Nic

Using the arm, which is, you know, what I would have liked. And you see this in movies like that a lot when they need to show the main guy clearly got shot but it didn't hurt him, is just say it went all the way through. We just want a nice. It went all the way through. And that will. That'll tell the crowd, hey, don't worry about. This guy's going to be just fine.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

If you get shot in the bullet goes all the way through to you, nothing really happens.

Steve

Right. Right. As long as it misses all major organs. Cool. Anything else about toy soldiers that you wanted to talk about, Nic?

Nic

I think we covered a lot of it. I really. So, yeah, I want to hear your. Your final review. Review of this movie. To me, it's just. It's serious in an unserious way. So if you're watching it as something to just enjoy however you want to enjoy it, I get a lot of laughs from this movie, from the way that things happen. And I tend to like laughing at movies that are not comedies.

Steve

Right.

Nic

There's just a lot of value in that. So it's one of those things.

Steve

It's.

Nic

It's probably a top 10 movie for me, honestly.

Steve

Great.

Nic

And it just. In something that I'm having a shitty week and I want to watch something that I just enjoy. And it's kind of goofy. And my wife loves it too, which is a funny thing to bond with an adult over because she didn't grow up liking the same stuff I did. But she really gets a kick out of it. So that's great.

Steve

What.

Nic

What do we think of.

Steve

Yeah. So, I mean, I gotta be honest, I think. And you know, bringing up your lovely wife and her enjoyment of the film, not necessarily having seen it at a young age, maybe I'm wrong, but it really did feel to me like this is one of those movies that holds up for you in a directly correlated way to your nostalgia for it.

Nic

Totally.

Steve

And there's lots of movies like that. I adore the John Candy film Summer Rental, but almost nobody I know gives a crap about that movie. And I've showed it to people. They're like, yeah, this is a mediocre at best, you know, 80s comedy or whatever. But I love that movie.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

So I get that for sure. If I'm looking at this movie though, like just straight up top to bottom, like, what did I think of? Whatever. To me, it's a two out of five. It's not, certainly not one of the worst movies I've ever seen, but a nice, like, solid 2.0, which is pretty much underneath the level where I'm going. You should go out and see this. Yeah. I feel like if you did not see this movie when you were, you know, under 18 for the first time, you're probably not missing enough that you should go remedy that fact. But that's not to say it's like a bad movie or I didn't enjoy my time, but certainly not something that I probably won't be going back to watch it again.

Nic

Do you think if you're seeking that experience of seeing a kids take on the adult roles and save the day type situation, you get that better elsewhere, would you say? If you're going for this, then watch Red dawn or watch Iron Eagle or watch.

Steve

I feel like overall the best of those movies is Red dawn and the most. I haven't seen Red dawn in a long time now. So maybe we're going to do that at some point and rewatch that one and see. But Iron Eagle, I feel like it's probably very similar to this one where I have the nostalgia for it. So I love it. But it's probably no, on its face, no better or worse than this movie. They're all very reasonably enjoyable popcorn flicks with a lot of flaws. Some really unnecessary parts that just kind of, you know, neither move neither the character nor the plot forward, but are just there. Yeah. And that's normal, I think, especially for movies of this era. You know, this movie was not a huge success. The box office cost about 10 million to make and made about $15 million. So that's not. Not a bomb bomb per se, but it's clearly not a success, wasn't a big hit. And to me that sounds about right. It made its money back a little more. Yeah, that, that sounds like after watching it, that seems appropriate.

Nic

Yeah, that makes sense. And, and I do. I really enjoy Red Dawn. And the thing I think that separates A Red dawn from this is just that Red dawn is an extremely serious movie that takes itself extremely seriously. And there's a tone of it. This has some really disturbing individual things that happen. Individual shots and just gore in unnecessary places maybe. And I feel like it might be better served as a PG13 movie. So maybe if they PG13 ified it a bit, it would be a little more palatable to most people.

Steve

Yeah, I could see that. I can see if you pull the weird sex phone call scene and give the dean some other reason to bust Billy because I think that's an important character point for the two of them is to have him make Billy get that stuff back and kind of their.

Nic

Interaction and then scope bottles is a good. That's a great gag.

Steve

Great gag and a great sort of example of what kids did back then especially. But if you kind of continue get, take the sex out of that scene, put some clothes on the kids when they're hanging out together, give them some pajamas and then a handful fewer gore moments and it's an easy PG13. Yeah. And yeah, I do think it would be a little more palatable in that it's not trying to be an R rated movie.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

And I feel like there's a piece of me that is very kind of like disappointed in the filmmakers of like, you had a pretty good Red Dawn, Iron Eagle, PG13 kind of movie here, but you decided you needed it to be R. Yeah. And it's, it's so clear that the pieces that make it an R rated movie were just not particularly useful to the characters or to the plot.

Nic

Yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree with that about the rating. And I think if you took out the first 10 minutes of the movie, it might be a solid PG13. And I was actually, I told you that my wife and I watched it last night. We've seen it a bunch of times and we watched it with our 13 year old daughter who's watching it for the first time. And it's, it's hard to tell how impressed she is by stuff. But one of the things that we had discussed with each other is should we just start the movie 10 minutes in? Because we're missing a lot of the cringy parents stuff. So this movie for Me, like I said, I'm rating it based on what I get from it.

Steve

I don't know.

Nic

It checked so many boxes for me. I love the score. I think it looks nice. I like the setting of it. I'm always a sucker for things that take place in boarding school for some reason.

Steve

Interesting.

Nic

Okay. I love a dead poet society. I love the holdovers. I love these movies. I don't know, something about that environment.

Steve

Interesting.

Nic

That I always enjoy. I think that Sean Astin as Billy Tepper was kind of his last role as a kid. The last time that he could be a kid in something. I think he did a good job. I think the kids were all in their early twenties that were playing sixteen or fifteen year old. I'm going to give this movie a four and a half because I enjoy this movie every time I watch it. There's a lot of quotes that we drop around my house and it's one of those things that's going to be probably a big agree to disagree because I understand that the reasons I love it aren't going to necessarily apply to everyone. And I have a lot of history with this movie. It has a lot of things that I tend to generally like in a movie. So it's a confluence of a lot of my favorite stuff.

Steve

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me. You just a moment ago talked about it being kind of one of your top 10 favorites. I know favorite and basic. Those are two different rating scales. I'm a little surprised it doesn't get a straight five out of you. I gotta be honest.

Nic

I want to reserve the five. I feel like we're early in the pod and I don't want to drop a five. So I want there to be a lot of buzz on the streets about when Nic gonna finally drop his five.

Steve

Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, well that gives. That gives the official rating for this movie. What did I say 2.0 to that makes it a 6.5. Then that's. That's probably about right. I think even though our numbers are obviously very different from each other, very far apart. I. With IMDb, I was saying that's right near the IMDb score. I think that's an appropriate sort of way to look at this film is that it's going to work better for some people than for others. And you know, it is. Overall, I would not call it a bad movie. That is not definitely not my take. But you know, I'm not not recommending it generally speaking to most people. That's my take.

Nic

Come watch it at my house. Steve won't be invited.

Steve

There you go. Go watch it with Nic.

Nic

Well, that was fun. Steve, it was great talking toy soldiers with you and I'm looking forward to what you have next for us. What's our next choice here?

Steve

So the next movie that we're going to watch came out in 1992. It is a. A time capsule. It is. It is so indicative of its time and place. It is both part of the movement of sort of early to mid-90s, you know, kind of young filmmakers making very character driven films with very little that happens necessarily in the plot. This film is set in the beautiful northwestern city of Seattle. It stars Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kira Cedric and Matt Dillon. It is, of course, the movie singles from Cameron Crow. Interestingly enough, I actually did not see this movie back in the 90s when it came out. I saw it. My wife is a huge fan and she showed it to me about five years ago. And when I first watched, I thought to myself, holy shit, how have I never seen this movie? And we'll get into all the reasons why next time when we do this. So. So, Nic, what do you think? Singles?

Nic

I'm excited. I have never seen it and my wife is a big fan of it. So maybe we got to get the wives on for the after to have them chat about it. But yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It's not a kind of movie that I'm typically drawn to, so I have a lot of blank spots where I haven't seen these. So I'm really looking forward to. Forward to it.

Steve

Very cool. Well, that does it for us. For toy soldiers. Thank you all so much for listening to the second episode of 2Dads 1 Movie. And on behalf of Nic, I am Steve and we will be back next time with singles.

Nic

All right, thanks everyone. See you next week.

Steve

Take care.