#2 - Child's Play (2019)

Child's Play (2019)

(dir. Lars Klevberg)

Many moviegoers get really salty about remakes of classic films, and dismiss them as unnecessary or somehow disrespectful to the original without even giving them a chance. This is a bad attitude to have, especially when it means you are going to miss out on really fun movies like this one. It's funny, gory, and looks surprisingly good. And most of the special effects are practical! It introduces more than enough new and original ideas to justify its existence.

I hesitate to even call this a remake - it's more of a re-imagining of the story of the first film. If you were to change the look and name of the doll it would have very little in common with the original. Chucky is still a talking doll, but here he is also a "smart" device like a Google Home or Amazon Echo who is able to control other smart home devices. Instead of having the soul of a murderer, his violent tendencies come from a rogue artificial intelligence. The subtext/satire here is how vulnerable this kind of technology can make us.

While the original Chucky (voiced by the great Brad Dourif) had two modes - cute doll and violent foul-mouthed asshole - the doll here starts off as unnerving and slowly gets worse as time goes on. Mark Hamill provides the voice this time, and his performance is a big part of what makes the film work. He's often genuinely funny (especially when singing the doll's goofy friendship song) and suitably creepy when he needs to be. One perfectly valid complaint I've heard is the Chucky doll looks really bad, and I admit that I wasn't sure it was going to work when I first saw the design. It didn't take long for me to get used to it though, and I think that making him a bit unnerving right from the start was a good decision. I still think the original design was better, but this one works too.

It's not perfect for sure. Even though Chucky is mostly an actual animatronic, there are some shots of weak looking CGI when he is jumping or moving quickly. Luckily there aren't very many of these. In the third act it relies on a couple of cliché moments and dumb one-liners, but nothing so bad that it stops the movie from being fun.

I liked this a lot and definitely recommend checking it out. Just a heads up though, because I know this sort of thing can really bother people - in one scene Chucky kills a cat, and even though the actual act isn't explicitly shown it's still pretty disturbing.