There are films so spectacularly, unassumingly mediocre that one can simply shrug and move on: the sort of flick that tumbles out of the streaming deluge like another pair of socks in a laundry basket you never meant to sort. Tin Soldier is not that fortunate. This is an extravaganza of delusion, an action-thriller so abject in its self-regard, so confoundingly malformed, that you don’t merely endure its two senseless hours, you wage a month-long campaign for basic comprehension and actionable relief. Failed blockbusters usually suffer the indignity of audience indifference; here, Brad Furman assembles a cadre of Oscar winners, genre veterans and nepo-baby dynamite and still manages to create something more embarrassing than a TikTok fad gone stale by noon.
Let’s start at the top of this pileup: Robert De Niro,yes, De Niro, finding himself stranded in something thinner than most cellophane. Jamie Foxx, as the cryptically named “Bokushi,” and John Leguizamo gamely coasting by with the relaxed air of actors who have surely read the exit clauses in their contracts. And then there’s Scott Eastwood planted, glaring, narrating, a stilted monologue out of a Home Depot dramatization of PTSD. Each scene features a talent so utterly misused, so egregiously misplaced, it hurts like finding out your favorite novelist now ghostwrites instruction manuals for IKEA.
What shocks is not the badness, bad movies happen, but the violence of its pretense. You can feel the production’s self-flattery, straining for cool like a cover band playing Radiohead with two strings out of tune. Witness Furman's direction, previously sly enough to wrangle The Lincoln Lawyer, now orchestrating orange-tinged firefights and faux-epic standoffs with a style best described as "YouTube compilation of stuff that looks badass (circa 2005)." One suspects the entire creative braintrust gathered each morning to marathon Zack Snyder trailers with the sound off, then decided “Let’s do that, but without the technical competence or sense of irony.”
If the script is a shambles (and it is, believe me), then the technical execution is a slide into amateur hour. CGI effects appear borrowed from the vaults of Blade II and dusted off for maximum “throwback” humiliation. Action climaxes not in catharsis but in chaos: the final battle between Foxx and Eastwood unspools amid spastic gouts of flame—pyrotechnics as desperate self-parody, a Michael Bay knockoff directed by committee. The only explosions that sting are the ones destroying what little good will remains.
There’s a cruelty to watching great actors flail for dignity, but Tin Soldier doubles down, shoving De Niro and Foxx to one side as not merely underused but practically benched until the next exposition dump. Scott Eastwood, tasked with heavy-lifting charisma, can only manage “earnest substitute gym coach”—earnest, sure, but charisma? Like searching for water in a digital desert. It’s as if the film realized midway that it had no center and so doubled down on narration so wooden, you pray for termites.
And yet, it isn’t merely cheap, oh, that would almost be endearing, it is confused, more twisted up than the script notes for a canceled Call of Duty reboot. Pacing stutters, plot threads dangle, and with every new act you are left checking your watch and your will to live. The opening, promising enough, lasts maybe five minutes before the whole enterprise steers itself off a cliff built on digital rubble and go-nowhere masculinity.
If De Niro’s screen career has survived this long, it may finally have met its Waterloo, or at the very least a pit stop in purgatory. You come away from Tin Soldier exhausted, slightly offended, and profoundly bewildered: not so much angry at its crimes as embarrassed by the earnest idiocy behind them. And for Scott Eastwood? His cinematic inheritance now surely includes, along with his father’s glower, the distinction of having anchored a movie that ceases not to be bad, but to be ever so slightly fascinating in its catastrophic, un-self-aware striving.
A steaming pile of cinematic shit, perhaps, but even that possesses a rough, honest stink. Tin Soldier is something else: a manufactured embarrassment, packaged and shipped straight to the landfill where the most misguided hopes of action cinema go to rot. If you manage to remember it at all, may it be only as a warning: sometimes the greatest threat to cinema is not failure, but mediocrity convinced it has discovered greatness.
