[Film Review] Child's Play (2019)

This review contains spoilers.


The inherent horror of the killer doll trope is in seeing something not-quite-human spring to life, like an unnatural mimic flaunting it's abomination status and using its unsuspecting nature to kill you while your guard is down (preferably when it is dark, when you can hear the patter of little feet and a sudden streak of shadow pass in front of a puddle of moonlight).  In the original Child's Play, one of the ways it exploited this horror was by twisting the doll's cute face into a nasty snarl and having him spew vulgarities at his victims.  It was equally horror and camp, a classic styled horror with the vulgarity of the 80s.  When the doll can move on its own from the start as an inherent function, part of the horror is lost.

Child's Play (2019) is decidedly less horror than it is dark comedy, which is a smart decision.  The film plays with jump scares, tension, and brutal violence but spends a lot more time getting to know Andy and his mom.  Andy this time around is about 13 and his mother about 30, and Andy is having trouble making friends.  Chucky this time around is an AI Alexa-type bot that can walk and talk and control all of your appliances.  All Chucky wants is for Andy to be happy like a homicidal take on AI: Artificial Intelligence.  You probably know the beats already:  the horrors of interconnected technology gone wrong, the conflicts of simple AI in a complex world, and the disillusionment of youth, attached to technology without realizing the repercussions of being too reckless with it (it is, after all, the kids who teach Chucky to curse and stab).  The film works best when it's trying to be funny, like when Chucky watches Andy sleep and sings the best friend song to him all night, even when Andy asks him to go to sleep.  After all, you already know just about every incarnation of the doll trope (this is something like the eighth film with Chucky in it, not to mention the Annabelle films, of which a new one released this weekend).  One of the more memorable moments has Chucky skinning the face off of Andy's mom's boyfriend, who Andy hates, and putting the face on a watermelon.  Andy and his friends decide calling the cops is not an option (because they are dumb kids), and decide to wrap the melon up in wrapping paper to throw down the trash shoot.  When Andy's mom catches them, they come up with the lie that it is a present for the old lady down the hall, the mother of a detective Andy has somewhat befriended.  Que an awkward exchange where Andy is trying to give this not-a-present to the old lady while preventing anyone from opening it. There aren't nearly enough of these darkly funny scenes to really fix the tonal problems of the movie, but what's there is enough to show real promise in this new incarnation of the 30+ year old series.

Mark Hamill replaces Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky, which though he cannot hold a candle to Dourif's snarling representation of the character, he does about the best job anyone could ask for.  Hamill has the benefit of reinventing the character, which gives him far more leeway than if this had been a one-to-one remake.  Instead of Dourif's sociopathic and vulgar Chucky character, Hamill is given a naive and impressionable AI, one that is malfunctioning no less.  Given his malfunctioning nature, Chucky makes a lot less sense.  His motivations are generally to make Andy happy, but literally no one makes Andy as unhappy as Chucky does, which we would think would cause some kind of internal conflict in the doll, but it never does.  The film glosses over most of its machinations in favor of moving along the plot.  Chucky seems to teleport from place to place, and seems bent towards torture more than anything practical like we'd expect out of an AI.  All of this is more passable when the film is acting as a dark horror-comedy, but when things turn straight horror these kinds of inconsistencies stand out as tonally inconsistent and silly.

There's really no reason for this film to exist, and it barely has anything in common with the original to really warrant taking its name, but it's a flawed, fun time regardless.  If the series invests deeper in its campy and horror-comedy inclinations, then a sequel could actually improve on what is here, but I'm not holding my breath.  It's the kind of odd-ball thing you'd watch on Netflix during a dull night on your own, and it's more than serviceable as just that. 



6.0