Harefooted Halloween: Child's Play (2019)

What I Liked: Good setup.  There’s a commercial at the beginning that lays out all the features of the new Chucky doll and it’s a clever way to do an exposition dump.  Then we learn that Andy is the new kid in town and doesn’t have any friends.  When other kids see him with Chucky they go over and chat him up and they all hit it off.  So at first the doll is a positive force that gets Andy to cheer up, settle into his unfamiliar surroundings and act as a bridge to new relationships.

Gabriel Bateman (Unhinged) as Andy carries the movie.  He has a lot to handle with being a shy outsider, then finding some joy in playing with Chucky and befriending other kids in the apartment building, then anger towards his mother’s shitty ass boyfriend, confusion when Chucky becomes extremely overprotective, dread when he realizes Chucky’s killing people and ultimately finding the courage to battle him.  Aubrey Plaza (Ingrid Goes West) who plays the mother is a relatively minor character so it’s up to Bateman and he turns in a well done natural performance.

Mark Hamill (What We Do in the Shadows) does some nice voice acting as Chucky.  It’s the opposite of Brad Dourif’s legendary take where the voice is higher in pitch, almost angelic, he uses a soothing tone, not aggressive at all and he doesn’t tell jokes.  He’s a dork really and that’s an interesting change.

What I Didn’t Like: The design of this Chucky looks bizarre to me.  His head is very large and he has the face of a forty five year old man child.  He’s lumpy with bags under his eyes and I don’t understand these choices.  Another issue is he’s dressed up in 80’s kids clothing like the original.  He should be wearing what a kid in 2019 would.

While the first thirty mins is well done the movie goes downhill when Chucky starts killing people.  Instead of being possessed by the soul of a serial killer his deal is his AI has run amok.  A chip programmer in Vietnam, where the dolls are manufactured, is fired and he gets revenge on the company by removing all safety protocols on this one chip in this one doll.  That’s fine but Chucky starts to act too much like a human.  He stalks and plays with his prey before dispatching them plus he sets up these elaborate Saw-adjacent deathtraps.  I would think a machine would look for the most direct way to bump someone off and not get a thrill out of the process.  Even if the AI in this film’s universe is far more advanced than ours I still don’t think it makes sense.

Yet another problem with the doll being a straight up computer is there’s no mystery as to how to defeat it.  In fact Andy and his friends hold down Chucky half way through and remove his battery without a ton of effort.  The picture should be over right there.  It’s only when the apartment building’s maintenance guy finds him in the trash and repairs him that the menace continues.

Andy along with all the other kids are a little too old at around twelve or thirteen to be playing with a doll like this.  The movie acknowledges this and my guess is since Chucky does some nasty fucked up shit to Andy (taking inspiration from Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 which Andy and his friends watch at one point) the filmmakers wanted the audience to be ok with the brutality he’s subjected to so they aged him up.  It’s just strange to see these teenagers get so into the doll.  I know it possesses sophisticated technology but between the thing always wanting to sing a lame song about friendship, the horribly dated infantile clothing, the aesthetic of the box and app interface it’s clearly meant for younger children.

Overall Impressions: The filmmakers had a neat idea for this updated version of Child’s Play, AI gets crazy to the point where it sees anything but total devotion to it as a threat that needs to be eliminated (pretty much the same backstory as The Terminator).  I also like the warning about tech giants ruling our lives by giving Chucky the ability to control other devices because he and all the gizmos in the film are made by one company and share an ecosystem.  And of course this is exploited for some deaths.  But if they had made the movie more play-like and kept the action almost entirely in the apartment with Chucky acting weirder and more possessive of Andy it could’ve been a taught terrifying thriller.  Instead it kinda devolves into a run of the mill slasher where it feels like the filmmakers didn’t think the concept through all the way.  Or maybe it went through too many rewrites or studio notes or something.

This isn’t the worst horror remake out there but it’s not among one of the better ones either.  There are more problems than good points unfortunately.  If you haven’t seen any of the old Child’s Play pictures before I would encourage you to go back to the original first before tackling this one.  If you’re a fan of the series, especially the first three films that are less jokey, then this might be worth checking out.