‘Tin Soldier’ movie review: Jamie Foxx, Robert De Niro march through murky Scott Eastwood thriller

A former cultist infiltrates a standoff between the FBI and a dangerous sect made up of veterans in Tin Soldier, which was unceremoniously dumped on Prime Video this weekend. Despite an interesting premise and a terrific cast that goes well beyond Oscar-winners Robert De Niro and Jamie Foxx, this murky mess feels like it was cobbled together from a bare minimum of available elements, and tediously struggles to crawl past a 75-minute runtime.

Tin Soldier features Foxx as Leon K. Prudhomme, a soldier who returned from duty with PTSD and a realization that the military was no longer there to help him. He forms The Program, which starts out as a support community for veterans but turns into an isolated and especially dangerous Idaho cult. Rebranding himself as The Bokushi, Prudhomme and his followers embark on a terrorist plot to take revenge on the U.S. government.

Or something like that. An engaging opening scene cuts between an expository interview with Foxx’s Prudhomme (shades of Ed Harris in The Rock) and a failed infiltration of his compound led by active duty soldier Luke Dunn (John Leguizamo) and woman-on-the-inside Mama Suki (Rita Ora), but exactly what The Bokushi and his followers are up to is largely left to our imagination.

Instead, Tin Soldier focuses primarily on Nash Cavanaugh (Scott Eastwood), a former member of The Program who left after the death of his wife and fellow member Evoli Carmichael (Nora Arnezeder) in a car crash. Nash is recruited to lead another infiltration of the compound by top brass Emmanuel Ashburn (De Niro) before FBI agents can burst down their doors, with Dunn and fellow soldiers Kivon Jackson (Shamier Anderson) and Lawrence Kollock (Yul Vazquez) in tow.

Cavanaugh, looking like Tom Hanks in Cast Away and happy to return to his life of depression on the streets, initially refuses the assignment. But Ashburn has an ace up his sleeve: a message smuggled out of the compound by one of its children, which suggests that Nash’s wife is alive and well within its walls.

This simple setup suggests that Tin Soldier should manage at least some minor thrills, but there’s one key problem: as Cavanaugh and his team make their way into the compound, hazy, half-remembered flashbacks of Nash and Evoli start to overtake the narrative. Soon, the present-day action itself is swallowed up into a hallucinatory mire so vague that we question the very nature of what we’re seeing onscreen.

Tin Soldier was directed and co-written by Brad Furman, who has made some good movies (The Lincoln Lawyer) and some not-so-good ones (Runner Runner), but his previous films have each been competently assembled. This one is not. The narrative is so fuzzy and unclear that we never quite understand what’s going on, and rewinding and rewatching doesn’t help.

What is The Program’s plan? Why is the FBI threatening to kick down their door? What does Ashburn hope to achieve by getting to them first? Why are all these people killing each other, sometimes throwing their own bodies out of the window as suicide bombers (instead of, you know, throwing the explosives)? Cult = bad only goes so far; we need more information to be able to invest in this story.

The narrative murkiness suggests some kind of Carnival of Souls or Jacob’s Ladder scenario, but the film has clearly not been conceived in that manner; instead, it’s painfully obvious that production difficulties have resulted in the mess that we’re watching. There’s a story somewhere about what went wrong behind the scenes of Tin Soldier—perhaps they ran out of money halfway through shooting—that is infinitely more interesting than what has ended up on the screen.

Instead, the movie crawls to reach a sufficient running time, with heavy reliance on flashbacks to get past 75 minutes. The climactic fight between Nash and The Bokushi has been crafted without the benefit of a screenplay, and extended in post-production; the characters trade poorly edited blows as a timer ticks down to some unknown result. A final 90-second zoom out of San Diego beaches recalls Wavelength as Tin Soldier attempts to fight off its own end credits.

The cast hints at what this movie could have been. Anderson, coming off memorable roles in John Wick: Chapter 4 and The Luckiest Man in America, has only a couple of lines; ditto Vazquez, who recently featured in Severance. They, at least, get more to do than Saïd Taghmaoui (La Haine) as The Bokushi’s right-hand man. Foxx, De Niro, Leguizamo, and Arnezeder are all wasted in similar manner. Eastwood is a capable lead and he’s surrounded by performers that could elevate the material. But they would need material to elevate in the first place.

Ultimately, Tin Soldier is less a movie than a collection of underdeveloped ideas, strung together with just enough connective tissue to qualify as a feature. The result is frustrating—not just because of what it is, but because of what it clearly could have been.