10 Massively Underrated Movies From The 1990s

2. Toy Soldiers

Toy Soldiers
TriStar Pictures

Is it any surprise that a movie from the writer of Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Panic Room, and Spider-Man is pretty darn entertaining?

1991's Toy Soldiers is one of the earliest flicks on Lord Of The Rings star Sean Astin's filmography, revolving around a group of delinquent teens who choose to fight back against a gang of terrorists who've taken over their school.

It's the machine gun-wielding Astin who steals the entire movie, with the young actor displaying the determination and spirit that made him such a great fit for Samwise Gamgee roughly a decade later. He also gets to spit in the terrorists' sandwiches when he brings them lunch, so extra points for that too.

There are obvious shades of Die Hard and Home Alone incorporated into the plot here, and while Toy Soldiers is neither as good nor as beloved as those two classics, it's a confidently-made action-thriller that takes a silly premise and treats it with a surprising amount of seriousness - leading to a highly enjoyable end product.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!