Kenneth Zivo, the owner of a toy factory, dies and, before his death, hands over control to his brother, retired General Leland, believing that his son Leslie and daughter Alseisha will not be able to run such a large enterprise. The warrior immediately begins to restore his order and tries to create military toys, which leads to a confrontation between him and the children of the late creator of kind children's toys.
The film’s director Barry Levinson, being the Oscar-winning director of “Rain Man”, suddenly decided to make a children’s film, but with a completely non-childish problem – a kind of reasoning on the topic of “war and peace” – about the role of pacifism and the harmful influence of militarism. And the main role he invited the famous comedian Robin Williams, with whom he worked together in the tragicomedy Good Morning Vietnam.
Visually, Levinson’s film presents a multicolored surreal childhood fantasy, replete with unusual costumes, amazing scenery and grotesque characters. No wonder costume designers and art directors eventually received their Oscar nominations. But otherwise, the content of the film causes the effect of irritation. The plot as such is not too interesting, and the main message is clear even for a child, but its disclosure sometimes causes irritation. For comedy, there are too many infantile jokes and crooked characters, which gives the impression that good is too stupid to defeat straightforward evil. The plotlinearity adjacent to the childish spontaneity simply kills the pacifist mood of this film, turning the action into a bright color, instead of showing a simple children's film with a simple and obvious problem. Good actors try to outwit each other, but Robin Williams succeeds more at it.
It seems that Barry Levinson was so interested in creating the entourage for the film that he completely forgot that the movie should not only be beautiful, but also interesting. As a result, really good ideas were lost among the colorful colors of toys and characters so toy that it is simply impossible to take them seriously.