Child's Play Is A Surprising Cut Above Typical Horror Movie Remakes

I've never seen a Chucky movie before (though I'm certainly familiar with the character), so I had little in the way of expectations for what I expected to be yet another subpar horror movie remake in the form of Child's Play. After all, 21st-century horror movie remakes, unless they're Suspiria, rarely turn out well, as the likes of Pet Sematary can attest while the peculiar decision to make a new Chucky movie while the original creator of the character, Dan Mancini, was doing his own series of separate Chucky movies really left a sour taste in my mouth. So color me shocked to report that the new Child's Play remake, hailing from director Lars Klevberg, is actually a pretty well-crafted and fun enterprise!


Andy (Gabriel Bateman) is struggling to fit in and find friends in the neighborhood he and his Mom, Karen (Aubrey Plaza), have recently moved into. To give him some company, Karen buys her son a defective Buddi doll (voiced by Mark Hamill) that soon earns the moniker Chucky. This Buddi doll is a high-tech piece of machinery that can connect to all sorts of products its parent company has produced, making the new Chucky an Alexa, a TV remote and even an extension of Lyft in addition to just a Cabbage Patch Doll knock-off. Putting all those features into a doll doesn't really make a lot of sense but it does allow the new Child's Play to create horror movie scenarios using all kinds of topical 2019 technological trends.

Anywho, one of the best touches in Tyler Burton Smith's script is how the initial friendship between Andy and Chucky is played in a sincere manner that makes it clear why the two would bond with one another. Whereas the original Chucky was a burglar possessing the body of a doll for self-centered means, this new Chucky is decidedly attached to his owner to what eventually becomes a murderous degree as Chucky begins to take out people that hurt Andy. Taking this approach to this incarnation of the Chucky character is a great way to differentiate him from the original version of the killer doll and its mighty welcome to the script actually maintain Chucky's motivation consistently throughout the movie. Consistent character motivation, in my 2019 slasher movie remake??? What a shock!

Having Chucky be more of a naive toy slaughtering people to protect his bestest pal also creates delightful scenarios of dark comedy as Chucky's chipper attitude gets juxtaposed with all the vicious carnage he exacts on other people. It's a personality that proves to be extremely entertaining, especially since Mark Hamill delivers such a fun vocal performance as the character. Hamill can convincingly sell his performance as the more innocent version of Chucky quite well, one would totally buy that voice emerging from a doll aimed at youngsters. It's a nice touch on Hamill's part that he's able to exude menace while also maintaining Chucky's initial softness even as the character reaches his full apex as a vicious serial killer, especially since the presence of that softness results in so much of that aforementioned dark comedy.

Hamill's performance shows quite a bit of welcome personality that also shows up in the two primary adult performances played by Aubrey Plaza and Brian Tyree Henry. It's wonderful that Plaza basically just gets to play a variation on her typical snarky dry-witted acting personality here since it allows the character of Karen to have a lot more personality than typical horror movie mom's. As for Henry, he provides plenty of charm and some well-done comic line deliveries in a performance that, like Plaza's, takes advantage of an actor's specific gifts as a performer rather than run from them. It's basically the opposite of watching the immensely charismatic O'Shea Jackson Jr. get handed a boring character to play in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Of course, not everything works in Child's Play. Though the cinematography makes good use of bright background colors throughout most of the film, a climactic showdown in a toy store ends up being far too dimly lit to make heads or tails of what's going on while a group of kids Andy hangs out with feel like an afterthought in the story. Maybe there was another earlier draft of Child's Play where it was more like Stranger Things and these characters had a bigger role to play, but in this final version of the feature, Andy's friends feel like they could have been cut completely. As for the animatronics used for Chucky, they're mostly fine save for Chucky's odd-looking face, which always stands out as creepy-looking even in the earliest parts of the plot where Chucky is a benign buddy to Andy.

Even in this part of the story, Chucky's face kept reminding me of something that would show up as a sight gag on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack rather than something that would actually work as the face of a widely-distributed doll. Then again, Flapjack could frequently be a terrifying show, so maybe the new Child's Play was just trying to homage another horror storytelling icon. Maybe the animatronic used for Chucky is a mixed bag, but at least Chucky himself proves to be a highly entertaining slasher villain to hang out with for ninety minutes, especially since he brought along some unexpectedly delightful dark humor and distinctive performances with him. I went in expecting to be bored to death but instead Child's Play sliced and diced my low expectations and delivered something quite enjoyable!  A Child's Play remake turned out better than a new Jim Jarmusch movie, 2019 is indeed full of surprises.