What's your name? William Tepper. William Tepper.
What does your father do, William? He's a contractor.
According to this, he owns the third. Largest construction company in the world.
Yeah, he's a contractor.
You're not afraid? Hmm?
Yes, I'm afraid. Good.
Don't with me.
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 Nick Brianna.
All right everybody, how we doing? Movie heads.
We are back. Afternoon. Good evening. How you doing, Steve?
I'm good, thanks, Nick. How are you doing? I'm great, man. I'm very excited to
talk about what we have to talk about here today. Me too. This is going
to be good. 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? 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. 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%.
Okay, but you've never seen it. 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. Yeah, it's definitely. So,
yeah, just make sure everybody listening is totally clear. This was Nick's pick. He and
I go back and forth picking movies. Nick 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. Later.
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. Right. 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. But. 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. Okay. Words. I'm glad you brought it. To try to make it
more understandable, which I thought was an interesting choice. 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. 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.
Minimal research. 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. Yeah, no. Well, I watched it off a dvd.
Right. 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.
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. Right. There's no denying it. And so I think that was very effective.
I will give them that. 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. 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. It's more in the Red dawn category where
there's some even. That, though, was PG 13. That was. Red dawn was the first.
Okay, let's do a little bit of an aside here. All right? 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. Very interesting. Very interesting. But we're not talking about Red dawn today,
I promise. We're talking about toy soldiers. We might talk a little bit about Red
Dawn. There are some corollaries. It's true. Where do you want to take us here,
Nick? This is your pick. I want to. I want to follow your lead.
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. Not remotely.
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. And. 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. You thought it might be Howard Shore or something?
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. The rise of Taj. 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. Right. Terrorists show up to the school and it's already a botched
job from the beginning. Yeah, I, I,
can we pause for a second? Yeah. 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. 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. 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.
Right, Right. So you mentioned the kid. Right. 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?
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. I thought they were
just naming him Phil Donahue. Like, the character was just legit named Phil Donahue.
Why would you do that? Like, originally, he was supposed to be played
by the actual Phil Donahue, but he backed out at the last second. 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.
Exactly. But yeah. Okay, well, that, that makes a little more sense than him actually
being filled up. 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.
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. Okay. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. Yeah. And. And there's a lot of very explicit.
I believe you. 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. 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. 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. Is that like the pots and pans. I think
they said, for the rest of the year. Wow. He wakes his friends up and
he says we have to do something. We have to get back at him.
Yeah. 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. Antique,
really big oaken desks.
A 300 pound desk. 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.
How dare you, Billy. 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. Shaking with rage. Louis Gossett Jr. Is, but he still loves his
shit. 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. Yeah. 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. He does. He's got a type. It really is. It really
is. He's easily one of the best parts of this movie. 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. 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. 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. Right? Yes. Classic.
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. 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. 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. 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. Little flashier than us. 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. Right, right. He's nothing
like me, you know, so that's going to come up a little later.
When. 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. Five, I think. Right. For every student.
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. 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. Right. 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? Yes. Right.
There's so much of that. So many of these guys. 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. Absolutely. 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.
Yeah. So we had Keith Coogan. We had Will Wheaton. Right. 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.
Yep. We know him from a million things. I think
son in law is the thing that comes to mind. 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. Right? Come on, sit in on the meeting. 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. So. 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. He's the white guy. 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. Yeah. 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. 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. The glasses, everything. No wig or anything like. Yeah,
that's. That's your look, buddy. 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. His name is. It's Andrew
Diva. D I V O F F. I. Believe that sounds Eastern European.
Sounds definitely more Russian. 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. There to call that
out and say. 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.
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. Right. 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.
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? Ricardo. Ricardo. They get to Ricardo. I just call
him A.C. slater. 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. No.
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.
I think Billy sticking up for him made him heal faster. That's possible.
Billy is magic. Clearly. 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? 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.
Absolutely. Upper navel, above the navel. So yeah, it's just
a different time. 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. There's that. 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. 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. Before you do it? 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. They do. 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. 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. What am I doing?
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. Right. 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. 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. 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. 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? No,
no, no, no. He gets murked immediately. 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. 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.
Yes. 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. 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. So we lost a great artist. 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. 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. He would say the same way,
exactly. Yeah. 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. Right? 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. 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. 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. 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. Close it again. 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. So there. 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? Cut the power. That's right. 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.
Yeah. 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? Because when Billy's
late getting back to the head count, it sounds like they count three or four
times. That's true. 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. 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.
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.
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. Right. 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. Which is like,
okay, which. You should maybe do that first,
if that's on the list. Right. And then Arleigh
Ermey, responding on behalf of the. The U.S.
military Industrial Complex, says.
We. Have a shot at a successful assault here.
Successful assault. 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? Yeah.
But he was so excited about getting to use all that
stuff. Stuff? Oh, yeah, we got all those helicopters ready to go,
obviously several Humvees that have not yet been crashed. 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.
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. Right. 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.
It's the Nepo SWAT team. Yeah, it's the. 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. 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. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. They're going to. You can't do it
without a principal. 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. 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?
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.
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. Yeah. Because washing your hands,
that's like a wuss move. I know. You know, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do things or type something? I mean, wash your fist,
man. What are you preparing food for the masses.
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. Yep. 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. Right, Right. 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.
Yeah, but that's it. Basically, Louis Costa Jr. Comes flying
through the window and they kill Luis. 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.
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. 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. Yeah. If you get shot in the bullet goes all the
way through to you, nothing really happens. Right. Right.
As long as it misses all major organs.
Cool. Anything else about toy soldiers that you wanted to
talk about, Nick? 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. Right. There's just a lot of value in that. So it's
one of those things. It's. It's probably a top 10 movie for
me, honestly. Great. 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.
What. What do we think of. 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. Totally. 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. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Interaction and then scope bottles is a good. That's a great gag.
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. Yeah. 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.
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.
I don't know. 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. Interesting. Okay. I love
a dead poet society. I love the holdovers. I love these movies.
I don't know, something about that environment. Interesting. 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.
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. 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 Nick gonna finally drop his five. 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. Come watch it at my
house. Steve won't be invited. There you go. Go watch it with Nick. 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? 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, Nick, what do you think? Singles? 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. 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
Nick, I am Steve and we will be back next time with singles. All right,
thanks everyone. See you next week. Take care.