Movie Reaction: Child's Play

Formula: Child's Play + Eagle Eye

Child's Play is a movie about a toy that comes to life and kills people. At best, the idea only ever has one foot in reality. The original movie was sort of the "Disco Duck" of the 80's slasher craze. It was OK, but it signaled that the tropes, not the stories were driving the genre by then. It was a silly idea then. It's a silly idea now to remake it. The only question with the reboot/remake is how silly they wanted it to be.

To my surprise, the new Child's Play mostly plays things straight. Karen (Aubrey Plaza) is a young single mother of Andy (Gabriel Batemand). She's having trouble making ends meet but manages to get Andy a My Buddy doll for his birthday after a defective one is returned to the story she works at. Oh yeah, the My Buddy dolls have been updated. Now, they are Google Home but with advanced artificial intelligence. And Andy's My Buddy, named Chucky, had all its  safety settings turned off by an angry factory worker. In standard I, Robot fashion, Chucky eventually learns that violence is the answer to all questions and starts killing everyone in his and Andy's way.

The move doesn't lean heavily on camp. There are a few self-aware jokes, but it isn't trying to match the tone of the later Chucky movies (Remember Bride of Chucky? Oof). This movie is a throwback. They really don't make movies like this very much anymore. Not bigger studios. The big set pieces of the movie are the different kills. Most of the effort goes into staging those. The internal logic of the movie barely tracks, so don't even try to follow it.

I wasn't a huge fan of this Chucky. Mark Hammill is great as the voice of Chucky, but the doll just didn't look right. They tried to bridge the gap between menacing and believable and fell a little short of both. To be fair, the same could be said about the doll from the original, but I'm used to that one.

The greatest compliment that I can pay to this movie is that it felt like it was out of a different era; a late-era slasher movie, just like the original. It's not an exact replica of the original movie, but it captures the same tone and style. Unfortunately, this isn't a kind of horror movie I like very much. I spent too much time distracted by the plot holes (that I'm sure the filmmakers noticed but weren't concerned about), and I've never cared about how nifty the staging of kill was. 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend