‘Toy Soldiers’ (R)

"Toy Soldiers" is an entertaining amalgam of "Dead Poets Society," "Die Hard" and "Red Dawn," in which a group of Colombian drug terrorists seize a private school to force the American government to free an extradited drug czar.

Seems Luis Cali, the terrorist leader, is the drug lord's most loving son, and he seizes the Regis School because it's attended by the son of the judge who will be sentencing his father. That one gets away and Cali's suddenly saddled with 92 boys, all of whom seem to have powerful parents, none more so than Joey Trotta, whose very unloved dad is the Mafia don of New Jersey. Then there's the wily Billy Tepper, abandoned by his folks and on his fourth boarding school in four years; Snuffy Bradbury, whose dad is a rich banker and chairman of the Republican Party to boot; Ricardo Montoya, scion of a big-time lawyer; and Hank Giles, whose dad heads up the House Armed Services Committee.

Despite their bloodlines -- or because of them -- all these boys have serious problems with authority, manifested by constant pranks and the fairly harmless horseplay made possible by their intimate knowledge of every air duct, underground tunnel and sewer drain on the Regis campus. Naturally, this will prove valuable as the predictable but nonetheless entertaining plot pits the prepsters against the Dirty Dozen, with the FBI, the U.S. Army and the school's dean (Lou Gossett Jr.) necessarily on the periphery. Cali has wired the school to explode at the touch of a button strapped to his wrist. Will the teens outwit the narco-terrorists? Are teenboy-bonding films big moneymakers or what?

Shot on the grounds of the Miller School in Charlottesville, "Toy Soldiers" is hardly deep, but it's diverting and so are most of the actors. As Tepper, Sean Astin is a mini Bruce Willis, a wise guy who is nonetheless resourceful, and a leader under duress. Other decent turns come from Wil Wheaton as Joey, Keith Coogan as Snuffy and Andrew Divoff as Cali. Gossett also comes across well as the compassionate but tough dean, and the filmmakers should be commended for what seems to be sensitive, color-blind casting in the authority roles.

Still, there are some loopholes, not the least of which is the eventual revelation that Cali had been sent to an American military prep school in his wild youth; at the very least he should have been quite familiar with secret escape routes and prep rituals. Instead, he lets the students mill around the quadrangle with only hourly head counts interrupting their frolics.

There's a little blood and mayhem, some salty language and several crucial deadlines that threaten to become literal, but the film is more concerned with tension than release. First-time director Daniel Petrie Jr. knows his way around this roughhouse terrain -- he wrote "Beverly Hills Cop," "The Big Easy" and "Shoot to Kill" -- and while he keeps things taut, he has yet to display substance rather than style. Those hoping for a little "If..."- or even "Lord of the Flies"-style drama will simply have to rent those films.