Paramount Pictures & Columbia TriStar
Rating: C+
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| No thoughts. Brain scampled egg. |
Ah, that span of time from the late eighties to the early aughts when the noble savage trope became the default media portrayal for an entire race of human beings. This was thanks in no small part to Gen X rebelling against the honestly more grounded portrayal of natives by the previous generation's films such as The Searchers (1956) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). You couldn't swing a dead cat between the years of 1986 and 1998 without hitting the Obligatory Native American Token Character. They were everywhere. Didn't matter if it was X-Men, Power Rangers, or that one Star Trek show I still haven't watched – the red man cometh. It wasn't malicious. In fact, quite the opposite.
If you went through the U.S. public educational system during the latter half of the 20th century you were programmed to see Native Americans as this one congealed, homogenized mass of folks who were so peaceful and pure their culture was neither morally nor technologically changed for thousands of years until the white man arrived and stole their land through trickery. Native Americans were framed as the anti-heroes of history; fighting the good, politically correct fight against the (conveniently enough) current societal boogeymen of pollution, colonialism, and that damn evil United States Army who are always implied to be stodgy conservative types motivated by sheer materialistic greed, never left-leaning nanny statists who want everything on earth regulated and think they know better than everyone else. White folks of all stripes adored them and wanted to be like them. We used to trace our ancestry so we could brag at dinner parties about being one eighteenth Apache despite not knowing the first thing about that tribe or its history. Everybody working a nine-to-five wanted to be a working class anti-hero in the '90s and the less of your skin you had to risk to achieve that title, the better.
Sure, Geronimo straight up admits in his autobiography that his band murdered and robbed scores of innocent Mexican peasants and he has no regrets about it 'cause he doesn't view them as people, but I guess you can't be an anti-hero without the anti part.
Based on a book series you've never heard of (by Lynne Reid Banks) and sold for home release in a clamshell VHS you definitely remember, The Indian in the Cupboard is cut from that same safe '90s kids film cloth that most kids films were back when the film industry made movies aimed at more than just the emotionally stunted thirty-something “adult” demographic. Ya see, way back before TikTok or even WiFi our parents would rent out or purchase VHS tapes and sit us in front of the TV for two hours whenever they needed us to shut up long enough to itemize their deductibles on their one afternoon off. Thus there was an entire sub-industry in Hollywood dedicated exclusively to children's entertainment with only a proximal interest in appealing to adults on the grounds somebody's gotta be old enough to drive the rugrats to the cinema. I certainly watched this flick enough times growing up.
This movie, The Swan Princess (1994), Jumanji (1995), Toy Story (1995), Aladdin (1992), The Little Mermaid (1989), The Lost World (1997), Batman Forever (1995), and TV rips of Jurassic Park (1993) and both Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) were in frequent rotation on the family VHS player between the years of 1997 and 2003. I didn't watch the original Star Wars until many years later. My younger brother, for his sins, was a mark for both Monsters, Inc. (2001) and The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly (1998). By then I'd moved on to more intellectually stimulating works of art such as the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy, which I thought were the peak of cinema at age nine despite having access to the Indiana Jones trilogy and the whole filmography of James Cameron at the local library I walked by at least twice a week every week as a teenager.
Enough disjointed stalling. It's been twenty years since I've seen this thing and I've been waiting since high school for the Nostalgia Critic to review this and he still hasn't. If you want something done right....
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Our protagonist is the stupidly named Omri (Hal Scardino), who gets a surprise party for his ninth birthday. We get a rare full usage of the 'Happy Birthday' song, which is probably what most of the movie's $45,000,000 budget went to. Omri's two brothers (Vincent Kartheiser & Ryan Olson) gift him an old cupboard they found in the alleyway that they've mercifully cleaned up and their mother (a very underutilized Lindsay Crouse) finds a key to fit it that belonged to her mother. This is apparently the only thing she kept from her mother for whatever reason. So likely the key has some unexplained cosmic significance. You just don't point something like that out without it meaning something. Turns out I'm right. The key is outright stated to be a magical artifact in the book series.
Omri's got friends, is doing well in school, isn't being bullied, is perfectly physically healthy, has a surprisingly well-adjusted and loving middle class nuclear family... hell, his dad (Richard Jenkins) even makes a point to kiss him goodnight every night whenever he's not working on a skylight or calling him out of the room at plot convenient times. The kid's got no real problems aside from living in NYC and having a space between his front teeth large enough it could be mistaken for an impact crater. I cannot decide if it's refreshingly realistic or bad fiction writing. Apparently I'm a bloomer given how all of my reviews thus far have been glowingly positive so I'm gonna side with refreshing.
The next day at school Omri's friend Patrick (Rishi Bhat, whom I remember starring in way more movies than he did; I blame his really expressive eyebrows for this) gifts him an admittedly shitty plastic Indian figurine that he probably filched from the random plastic Indian display they have in the hallway for some reason. Omri puts the figure inside the cupboard overnight and locks it, waking up the next morning to discover it's been transformed into a very much alive (if four inches tall) Iroquois named Little Bear (Litefoot).
Turns out the cupboard is in fact a highly advanced magical device which turns plastic toys into real flesh-and-blood people and their accessories into functioning technological devices, seemingly summoning their real life counterparts from out of history and / or alternate dimensions parallel to our own. How? Why? No explanation given. Nor is one required.
Because Omri is a kid this automatically leads to the most memorable scene in the film in which he experiments to see if it's the cupboard that's magic or specifically just his crappy plastic Indian toy by dumping a bunch of his action figures inside and turning the key. After witnessing Darth Vader throwing down with a t-rex while a Cardassian gets in a firefight with RoboCop, Omri realizes that magic is in fact terrifying and should only be used sensibly. Such as when Little Bear gets pecked by a bird and he uses the cupboard to summon up WWI British combat medic Tommy Atkins (Steve Coogan), whom he easily convinces is dreaming, to patch him up.
Little Bear initially views the gigantic-ass mouth-breathing preteen as a god of some sort and pals around with him out of a sense of religious awe. This thankfully doesn't last long as Little Bear has more than two brain cells to rub together and he realizes that Omri, despite being two hundred feet tall and magic, is just a kid. Then he starts paling around with him 'cause hey, magic giant kid who's just as scared of all this as I am. This switch occurs when Omri uses the cupboard to summon up an old Mohawk warrior for the sole purpose of yoinking a properly sized bow for Little Bear from him. The shock of seeing the eight foot gap between Omri's front teeth gives the old man a lethal heart attack. Little Bear correctly chews him out for toying with forces he doesn't understand while revealing he was in the process of taking his nephew on a rite of passage camping trip when he was plucked out of his reality into this one. It's the best bit of acting in the whole flick and a solid bit of writing.
Omri's equally stupidly named older brothers Gillion (Vincent Kartheiser) and Adiel (Ryan Olson, I assume anyway; his name is never spoken in the film and I haven't read the book so I'm having to go off of IMDB for this one) get interested in Omri borrowing random shit from around the house to give to his tiny friend and sneak into his room one day to look for their missing junk.
Omri responds sensibly and PUNT KICKS HIS BROTHER'S CUTE LITTLE PET RAT LIKE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATHIC ASSHOLE, CAUSING IT TO VIOLENTLY DRIBBLE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE STAIRS IN ITS HAMSTER BALL WHILE SPINNING WITH THE CENTRIFUGAL FORCE OF AN F2 TORNADO. This is played for laughs. Omri's brothers prove to be better men than I when they politely leave the room without throwing him down the stairs after the poor critter which is, mercifully, unharmed. Hell, these are about the chillest older brothers I've seen in fiction. They only seek sibling vengeance upon Omri when he later hides the hamster ball and do so by hiding his magic cupboard in turn... which they then readily give back after the hamster ball is returned to them. The fiends! The perfectly reasonable fiends!
You monster.
Omri eventually tells Patrick about Little Bear and his magic cupboard. Patrick then makes the 1000 IQ play of putting a cowboy figure into the cupboard against Omri's wishes which then comes to life as an emotionally distraught miniman named Boone (David Keith, who I incorrectly remembered as having been played by Owen Wilson thanks to Night at the Museum). Little Bear and Boone eventually bond over their love of children and their shared manlet status after the expected initial conflagration. I mean, over a century of time separates them (Little Bear drops 1761 and the French & Indian War while discussing when he comes from and Boone outright states he's from Texas in the year 1876) so there's really no reason for them to be beefing aside from the pure aesthetic of cowboys versus Indians.
I wonder if he's seen their famous Pet Sematary.
I should also note each time Omri or Patrick take a plastic Indian from this random plastic Indian school display they replace it with a wildly unfitting action figure that goes unremarked upon by any other character – the first time around an Aracula Skeleton Warriors figure and the second time one of Limburger of Biker Mice From Mars fame. I can guarantee you haven't thought of either of those franchises in a long, long while if at all. Why yes, I did pause this movie midway through to watch the Biker Mice From Mars intro four times on repeat.
I was more of a SWAT Kats kid but damned if this isn't the exact kinda stupid shit I love.
One night Little Bear gets war wacky and accidentally shoots Boone thought the chest with an arrow while the gang watch a particularly violent western on television. The same thing happened to my buddy Eric once. Little Bear then has to shimmy down between the floorboards to retrieve the fallen key to the cupboard. Therein he faces... the rat! The monstrously evil, confused, chubby, adorable pet rat that somehow escaped from its cage. Thankfully he doesn't kill it. That poor rat has been through enough. They then use the cupboard to resummon Tommy to patch up Boone. This incident is enough to convince the boys that having tiny men with functioning weaponry as glorified pets is in fact a bad idea and resolve to send them back.
But first Omri offers Little Bear a wife in the form of a plastic lady he stole from the school's random plastic Indian display, which is a plot detail getting a lot more mileage than I expected it would. Little Bear refuses on the grounds that he'd be magically kidnapping some random chick who very likely already has a husband and kids. Aside from being a superstitious goof, Little Bear is obviously a very morally upright dude contrasted with Omri and Patrick being dumbass kids dicking around with magic they do not understand. This apparently becomes the major point of conflict in the book's four sequels, in which the kids forget the moral of this story and totally fuck over the timeline in Little Bear's world by trying to play god. In other news, cannot wait for the Dune movie sequels.
Little Bear does a ritual to become Omri's guardian... stepfather... bloodbrother... tribesmate... something or another before getting put back in the cupboard along with Boone and becoming toys again. Omri fictionalizes the events of this week into a short story his teachers like and the music swells really obnoxiously as if something profound was learned.
FIN
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The child acting is average. Rishi is a smidge better than Scardino, who tries his best but is just too reserved and inexperienced to carry a movie. They can't all be Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore. Litefoot likewise gives it the ol' college try and turns in a serviceable performance. He is by far the best part of the ensemble and he does it while freezing his ass off in buckskin chaps with sharpie scribbles all over his body. That said, I'm sure he's better at rapping than acting. After all, his official website does proudly claim he won the “Best Male Artist” and “Artist of the Year” honors from the Native American Music Awards. I should mention that I recently won the “Best Blogger” award at the 54th Annual Balding White Guys Who Wear Jean Jackets and Live in Upstate Georgia Awards. The BWGWWJJ&LUG association is very prestigious and I'm honored to be recognized by them.
Update: Shit, he's actually got good flow! I apologze, Litefoot. Please don't scalp me. I have a bad enough hairline as is. As far as mid-nineties west coast rap goes it's not bad. Touch underrated, even.
The film score by Randy Edelman is rather good but is kinda rather very extremely overused to the point it becomes grating. I get that you're dealing with child actors and you need to
do a lot of heavy lifting to support them, but after a certain point
it just becomes blatant you've got no faith at all in the actors to
carry the emotion of the scene and are giving them a set of crutches.
The VFX are (on the whole) incredibly good and hold up to this day. Big surprise, Industrial Light & Magic know their shit. Seamless composite shots and the utilization of forced perspective with oversized sets and props will do that. Things tend to look the best if they're actually there. The use of tight close-ups and blurred backgrounds as a cheat in some scenes is noticeable but forgivable.
This movie ba-bombed at the box office and came up ten million short of meeting its budget, which means it came between fifteen and twenty million shy of turning a profit. Much like its contemporaries Balto (1995) and The Swan Princess (1994) it almost made up for this be having a very good run on VHS and TV. If you were a kid during the nineties there's a strong chance you've seen this flick at least once. Seems this one's really fallen by the wayside in the decades since. I can kinda see why. It's a solid movie with occasionally great VFX but there's really nothing that sticks with you. It's one of those “you had to be there” kinda movies that encapsulates one specific tonal vibe from a bygone era that just comes off as quaint to those reminiscing and outright kitsch to those without context.
Disney's Pocahontas (1995) was released just a couple weeks before this movie and doubtless ate into its profitability. In addition to the usual expected Disney dirty pool and bastardry with distribution tactics, the films overlap thematically and Pocahontas does everything this flick does but much more aggressively and memorably, delivering a product that's simultaneously better and much worse. Kids nowadays would not understand the deluge of Native American guilt posting from back then. Maybe that's a good thing. It was like if you took blaxploitation but removed all the humor, satire, and badassery that made it work. That and blaxploitation was at least current – all the stereotypes in these Indian flicks were outmoded by at least a century when they were released. It's almost like they were never really about Native Americans at all and there was some other message the people making these products wanted to get across and this whole race of people acted as a politically convenient, easily disposable figurehead for them.
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| But hey, I could always be wrong. |
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FAVORITE QUOTES
PATRICK: ...why?
OMRI: Thank you.
TOMMY: Only doing my duty.
OMRI: Would you like to wake up now?
TOMMY: No, I never wanna wake up. Mud, German shells, awful bloody rats. They eat at wounded men. Ugh. Still, can't desert. Even in a dream.
OMRI: [after getting mugged by some kid with a mohawk] YOU DON'T DESERVE THAT HAIR!
BOONE: [after spending all morning sitting in a fanny pack with Little Bear, bonding while listening to Omri attend school] ...damn.
[Boone and Little Bear both start laughing at the sheer absurdity of their situation]
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