I have no idea what Tin Soldier is, where it came from, how it was released, or who thought it’d be a good idea. Only rarely is a cinematic experience this confounding, this silly on so many levels, this cheap-looking, this full of itself, and yet this stacked with respectable actors who lend it a semblance of respectability. I have no idea where to start, so we might as well start at the beginning.
Having presumably been sat on a dusty shelf somewhere since it was filmed in 2022, the lax quality control standards at Prime Video have given a home to Brad Furman’s murky 75-minute actioner. The suspicious absence of any real marketing should be a giveaway, and the lack of any critical reception weirder still. A movie starring Oscar winners Robert De Niro (Zero Day) and Jamie Foxx (Back in Action) that it seems even hobbyist blogs daren’t touch? There’s something radioactive about Tin Soldier.
Plot-wise, it seems to have been extracted from the mind of a drunk Republican uncle who had a little too much at a family get-together. Leon K. Prudhomme (Foxx) is a decorated former U.S. military officer who established “The Program”, a support community for PTSD-afflicted veterans who had been neglected by the country they fought to defend. Under the guise of altruism, Prudhomme reinvented himself as “The Bokushi”, a flamboyant cult leader, and reshaped the Program into a vengeful death cult hell-bent on revenge against Uncle Sam.
Now, Emmanuel Ashburn (De Niro) wants the Bokushi taken out before his organization becomes too dangerous, and to do that, he needs the help of former disciple Nash Cavanaugh (Scott Eastwood, Alarum). Nash left the Program after the death of his wife, Evoli Carmichael (Nora Arnezeder), but he’s lured onto the mission after receiving a message from a woman on the inside named Mama Suki (Rita Ora) that implies Evoli is still alive. With soldiers Luke Dunn (John Leguizamo, The Menu), Kivon Jackson (Shamier Anderson, Apple TV+’s Invasion), and Lawrence Kollock (Yul Vazquez, Severance), Nash leads a raid on the Bokushi’s compound, where everything goes to hallucinatory Hell.
Jamie Foxx in Tin Soldier
There’s a world where the premise of Tin Soldier makes for a perfectly acceptable – if silly – action movie, but as soon as Nash sets foot on the Bokushi’s territory, he begins to suffer from flashbacks and hallucinations that quickly overwhelm the straightforward A-B plot. Eventually, the movie takes on a trippy funhouse mirror vibe that makes things impossible to follow and even harder to take seriously. The line between real and imagined becomes blurry, and you can never quite tell whether something looks off-kilter because it’s indicative of an illusion or because the movie just didn’t have the budget to do a proper job of it.
Ordinarily, this would be a case of a filmmaker’s reach exceeding his grasp, but Brad Furman is a decent enough director that a movie this incoherent seems out of character. The same can be said for the cast. Nobody’s going to claim that De Niro and Foxx, accolades aside, always pick great projects, and the less said about Scott Eastwood in that regard the better, but don’t these people have agents? Why has nobody pulled them aside and pointed out that this is a deeply terrible movie? I can only surmise that it started out as a much better movie, and that a troubled production resulted in what was released. How blighted must that production have been to get us here? I’d love to know.
On the upside, it barely lasts 75 minutes. There’s that old Ebert quote about every bad movie being too long and no good movie being long enough, which I think applies here, but it’s still worth pointing out that the runtime is mercifully brief. Presumably it was hacked to bits in the edit, which is just as well – if only they hadn’t left all the bits that might have made sense and been enjoyable to watch on the cutting room floor. The climactic battle is particularly hilarious – a one-on-one showdown that seems to have been filmed with only one actor at a time and stitched together in post-production with the aid of ropey VFX. It feels about right for Tin Soldier to end that way.