Avaliações do Metacritic

Toy Soldiers is a crisp, suspenseful thriller well tailored to the tastes of teen-age audiences, who will doubtless appreciate such touches as the equivalent microchips found in one student's radio-controlled airplane and the chief terrorist's detonator, which is rigged to blow up the entire school.

Toy Soldiers is a very entertaining action film that updates 1981's sleeper hit Taps. Seeing Sean Astin (son of John Astin and Patty Duke) and his pranksters turn into commandos who wipe out the nasty invaders makes for purely escapist, crowd-pleasing pleasure.

The kids' attainment of self-respect and adulthood through sabotage and risky business is achieved at considerable cost, with Petrie pulling no punches in his depiction of violence. The exciting action set pieces, likewise, are staged with a verve and skill above and beyond the call of duty.

Toy Soldiers is hardly deep, but it's diverting and so are most of the actors. First-time director Daniel Petrie Jr. knows his way around this roughhouse terrain -- he wrote Beverly Hills Cop, The Big Easy and Shoot to Kill -- and while he keeps things taut, he has yet to display substance rather than style.

Toy Soldiers is little more than macho posturing for young men searching for their identities. As such the image of a beefy Astin sporting a machine gun is not especially healthy nor is it especially imaginative. There is an attempt at balance with the younger, nerdier intelligent kids having a role in their own salvation and a representative cast including kids of all colors. For those concessions and for directorial competence, I am grateful.

It’s Dead Poets Society meets Die Hard. The movie is competent, smoothly photographed, and pretty much free of false, baby-Rambo heroics. It’s so inoffensive that you can almost overlook its central drawback — that the students don’t have much personality.

Petrie's directing debut - he had been a scriptwriter - is proficient and assured from the technical standpoint, but he's unable to overcome the essential preposterousness of his screenplay. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

If your teenage sons are looking for heroes, send them to Toy Soldiers. Even if they're not, send them anyway. They'll probably enjoy watching a judge being thrown out of a helicopter. Too bad the judge didn't take the script with him. Most reasoning adults will probably reject this far-fetched clash between American preppies and Colombian terrorists.

Toy Soldiers, a film with earnest performances and professional production values, is constructed out of characters, situations and gimmicks that will be instantly recognized by the weary viewer. There is nothing new here.

Unfortunately, Petrie's idea of dramatic tension is to expose more boyish flesh as the movie progresses. And as more and more lumpy young pectorals are flashed, more and more people and objects are exploded. All this is accompanied by a persistently obnoxious soundtrack that features patriotic fanfares. And as the four different plots bump into each other like blinded laboratory animals, we begin to feel empathy if not pity for everyone involved.