Tom Holland’s original Child’s Play is one of my favorite Halloween season go-to movies. The movie cleverly blends together elements of horror and comedy and Don Mancini expertly writes one of the most fun horror antagonists ever in Chucky the doll. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but it has some excellent moments and Chucky’s “just keeps coming” climax is one of my favorite parts of the movie. But truly what sells the original Child’s Play and makes it a classic is Brad Dourif’s, Charles Lee Ray. Dourif crushes the voice acting for Child’s Play and makes Chucky a genuinely menacing villain, while also making him one that is thoroughly enjoyable to watch. He is rude, crude, funny, full of personality and downright sinister.
While the remake of Child’s Play tries to make enough changes to update the original for our modern “internet of things” times, it feels a hollow shell of the original that never quite reaches its own potential.
Child’s Play is the story of Andy Barclay (Gabriel Bateman), who, after recently moving into a new apartment complex with his mother (Aubrey Plaza), receives last year’s model of the Kaslan Buddi doll, a cloud-connected smart-hub toy. Buddi is designed to learn and grow to “be your best friend”, but unbeknownst to Karen and Andy, this particular Buddi doll, Chucky (voiced by Mark Hamill), is not like the others, and will stop at nothing to make sure that he and Andy are “best friends forever”. The movie is directed by Lars Klevburg and also stars Brian Tyree Henry.
One of the biggest hurdles for any successful reboot or remake is to justify its existence. Child’s Play has the tall order of doing this but also doing so in the midst of what many fans consider to be the franchise’s resurgence. The Child’s Play franchise was on the rebound with the critically successful Cult of Chucky pointing the franchise in a new, fresh direction. So was a Chucky reboot necessary? Probably not, but while the idea of updating Chucky to the internet age is intriguing, Child’s Play might have been more successful as a Black Mirror episode rather than a remake.
The signature of Child’s Play is the ways in which it differs from the original. The highlight of the film is the E.T.-esque way in which Chucky learns about the world around him and how it works, learning violence from film, television and violet comments rather than from a killer living within him. Much like E.T., Chucky is an alive and thinking creature trying to understand this new world around him in order to grow closer to his “best buddy”. Klevburg gives us a Chucky that is far cuter than the original film, making his journey to maniacal murdering plaything one that gets the occasional “aww” as Chucky clumsily tries to figure out who he is and what it means to be a friend, albeit to sinister ends.
The problem with this version of Chucky is that his kills lack any real emotional weight. Instead of killing to cover his tracks or advance his own designs, Chucky is simply a robot killing those that allow him to fulfill his purpose of being a “best buddy”. Add this to a distractingly off character design that is hard to even look at without thinking to yourself, “there’s no way that a company as big as Kaslan would put something this ugly out” or “no wonder we never saw his face in any trailers.”
Design-wise, the original Chucky was a complex and clever animatronic doll that looked and felt like a real doll was possessed by an evil killer, but this rebooted Chucky’s practical effects are so bad, that when the film finally gives up on the animatronics and just goes with a full CGI Chucky, it’s actually welcome.
Even with the film’s inconsistent tone, a miscast Aubrey Plaza (the casting is so odd that the movie has to make a joke about her having a “productive sweet sixteen”), an emotionally weightless killer and a story that doesn’t hold up to the original, Child’s Play just feels more like a Black Mirror episode than a reboot of this long-running franchise. With that being said, it deserves at least a watch for franchise fans to see how they like this new spin. Those new to the franchise might find it an amusing summer slashfest, but it’s about as interesting as a new toy with batteries not included.
Rating: C
