Toys (1992)

My partner saw a scene from Toys on TikTok that made him want to watch it. I saw this when I was a kid and remembered hating it because it wasn’t a kids movie, but that’s not a real objection to rewatching a thing some 30 years later, even if I went into this thinking Barry Levinson was a really terrible director for his many, many, many just-left-of-center movies about politics and war that have the vim and vigor of a snarkily-worded article in The Atlantic. 

Toys decides to try doing that in a surrealist way, but you have to have a heart for that to work and this film has none. It’s weird seeing Robin Williams with the dial turned down to three, Joan Cusack’s character feels like Levinson left the set of Rain Man wanting to be mean about autistic people, and the costuming and set design is absolutely wasted on the Willy Wonka of shit.