The closest Hollywood has come to a live-action Simpsons episode, Small Soldiers opens with the takeover of Heartland Toys by Globotech, a defense contractor forced to diversify after the demise of our foreign enemies. (Its motto: "Turning swords into ploughshares.") Merge Heartland's creative department with Globotech's surplus hardware, and what do you get? Mobile commando action figures outfitted with weapons and artificial intelligence--which subsequently learn how to punch their way out of boxes and terrorize other toys. The vicious snap-on soldiers wind up in a generic Middle American suburb, where a misunderstood teen (Gregory Smith), his dreamy neighbor (Kirsten Dunst), and a race of benevolent rival toys (including an adorable one-eyed beastie called Ocula) must stop their onslaught.

Fueled by the Mad-magazine sensibility of director Joe Dante--the American cinema's premier psycho-adolescent wiseguy--Small Soldiers is essentially Toy Story as conceived by a bunch of juvenile glue-huffers. The movie's basic joke is that the bloodthirsty commando toys (voiced by Tommy Lee Jones and about a third of the original Dirty Dozen) reenact the beefy clichs of war movies ranging from Patton to Apocalypse Now. Gung-ho gruntspeak has never sounded sillier or more impotent coming from the mouths of dolls. As the attack escalates, Dante places macho bloodlust in a pint-size context that makes it properly ridiculous. His puny commandos may talk a good game, but let 'em meet a housewife with a tennis racket, and they're toast.

The sickest gag--also the funniest and most provocative--is that the violence is more graphic (and hence more realistic) than any grown-up war movie could ever dare. Commandos get their plastic limbs crushed in bicycle spokes and ground up in garbage compactors; it's not a good sign when an embattled suburbanite revs up his lawn mower. Early reviews blasted the movie for this mayhem--one even misapplied the term "gore"--but Dante sets up this cartoon carnage as the logical extension of playing war. We're so much more sentimental about toys, the signifiers of childhood and innocence, than we are about soldiers. But in a real war, troops are ordered about as indiscriminately as action figures, and they get ripped apart as if they were plastic men. Funny how nobody complains about sending kids to Mulan, which makes combat look like a fitness camp.

My only gripe is that the production sometimes seems rushed, as if the filmmakers didn't have time to follow through on some of their brightest ideas. For example, it's too bad the good toys, the Gorgonites (voiced by the virtuosic Spinal Tap ensemble), don't come up with an ingenious nonviolent plan to defeat the commandos. Nevertheless, there's plenty here for sick minds to enjoy--the freakily satirical moment when the commandos mistake a Barbie-like collection for a whorehouse, the eerie scene in which Dunst is attacked by a swarm of hostile dolls. Skeptical of authority, distrustful of might, Small Soldiers will indeed warp your kids' minds, and in the very best ways.