ALL DOLLED UP ... AGAIN
Plastic psychopath Chucky is back and there will be blood
Thirty years is a long time in the world of toys. When the original Child’s Play was released in 1988, the state of the art was Teddy Ruxpin, an animatronic bear that spoke by means of an audio cassette player in its back. The evil Chucky was brought to sentience when a serial killer voodoo’d his soul into the doll.
The reboot, playing out like an episode of Black Mirror, imagines that the Buddi doll is already as smart as Siri, hooked up to the cloud and communicating wirelessly with other consumer goods as part of the Internet of Things. All that is required to turn Buddi into Chucky is for a disgruntled employee in a Vietnamese factory to disable the safety settings. Tyler Burton Smith’s screenplay leans heavily on the original but is coy about whether supernatural forces are also involved.
Directed by Norway’s Lars Klevberg, Child’s Play gets off to a nicely relaxed start, introducing tween Andy (Gabriel Bateman) and single parent Karen (Aubrey Plaza in her first Mom role), who brings the doll home from her retail-store workplace after someone returns it. Chucky is voiced by Mark Hamill, tuning his voice to a very un-jedi pitch.
At first, Chucky is more creepy than terrifying, although what it does to the family pet is beyond the pale. But if the antagonist is self-aware, so too is the movie, which makes sure that when the doll turns on humans, they’re humans who had it coming. Its first two victims are an odious womanizer and a pervy superintendent. Honestly, at this point my sympathies were still with the doll.
That changes when we realize Chucky is an equal-opportunity sadist. Alas, this is also when it will dawn on viewers that for all its winking cleverness, Child’s Play is still a member of the horror/slasher genus, and content to play by the rules of the genre. It even sets itself up for a sequel, although I’d argue there are at least two movies’ worth of blood in this one alone.
The human cast does good
work, not least the youngsters who join up with Andy to take on the doll, and Brian Tyree Henry as Detective Mike Norris, whose comic observations help keep the mood of the film from getting too dark. He’s the movie’s law and order.
And sure, the abilities of a twofoot plastic figurine may strain your credulity by the film’s final scene. But remember that toys are just getting smarter, even if movies aren’t quite keeping pace. And at least this Child’s Play doesn’t have to invoke any voodoo curses to keep it afloat.