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Child's Play (2019)



Even though it kind of sucks to see virtually every intellectual property under the sun being remade, Child's Play was particularly odd in seeing his creator (Don Mancini - writer of all 7 previous Chucky films) go through the pain of seeing someone else take his creation over in the transparent social media age. But, like Jason Voorhees before him, Chucky's an iconic villain without an iconic movie - so I was more than willing to give somebody else the chance to reinvent the series, especially after Mancini's latest straight to video sequel, Cult of Chucky. But clearly nobody really knows what to do with this franchise because this was just as bad.


I have to start with the doll itself. It looks like ass. I feel like nobody wants to come out and say it but it's absolutely hideous. Its the red headed elephant in the room. The doll design is atrocious. And not in a "so hideous its creepy" kind of way like the movie tries to play it off. It's straight up goofy. It's like his cheeks are covered in a pound of silly putty and his eyes look like giant, light-up magic eight balls. He's not scary in any way. The tech infusion is an interesting twist but overall, you can't try to reboot a series with your central antagonist getting butchered like that. Imagine if they tried to reboot Nightmare on Elm Street with a radically underdeveloped design for the new burn makeup that made him look like a lizard... oh wait, this has already happened...I wanted to overlook the doll design for an interesting story but overall, the ugly ass doll is a fitting representation of the film itself.


Right off the bat, you get the weakest 90 second origin story imaginable, with a verbally abused worker in a Vietnamese Buddi factory deciding to remove all of the safety parameter software (which takes all of about 4 mouse clicks) and then jump off the building to his death really only to up the film's body count. Then we embark on about 45 minutes of establishing that Andy doesn't have a very nice home life so even though he's too old to still carry around a smart device wrapped in a baby doll, he's desperate and lonely enough to actually bond with it. Which is about as deep as the "killer Alexa" concept goes, even though that's what the movie seems to be getting praise for. Chucky becomes a mirror for how we're raising our kids in the i-generation. Obsessed with recording everything, in constant need of instant gratification and infatuated with the easy access to violent and profane entertainment.


But the route it takes is painfully obvious in every step it takes. The moment you meet a character, you can pretty well guess whether or not Chucky is going to attack them. From the 1 note douche-bag mom's boyfriend character to the creepy maintenance guy leering at Aubrey Plaza a little too long in the hallways. We all know where this is going, so why the hell does it take so long to get anywhere? Everything is lined up so conveniently to feed into the next event that the only suspense you'll find here is when you check the time and realize you're only halfway through this fucking thing. We really don't need all these unnecessary E.T. homages to understand how connected Andy becomes with Chucky, lets get on with it already.


The oddest thing about the film is that I still have no idea who it's intended audience is. It doesn't have enough horror or humor to bring in the mature crowd its R-rating suggests and spends so much time with Andy and his friends that it feels like it's almost trying to aim for the pre-teen, Stranger Things crowd (especially with the oddly placed E.T. references). But even then, the group of kids in this film are so underdeveloped (as is every character in the movie) that you don't really care what happens to them either. And then there's the "killer Alexa" angle, where you'd think you might stumble into some kind of cool Black Mirror-like material but all it really does is give Chucky some bland new ways to murder people with his bluetooth enabled index finger. It's almost as if the film tries to be too many different things at once, which leads to a wildly erratic tone that waivers from outright comedy to tired slasher to social commentary - while not doing ANY of it well.


But other than his look, the most iconic thing about Chucky is Brad Dourif's maniacal voice. He brought so much character to that doll and made him absolutely larger than life. And while I was initially really excited about the casting of Mark Hamill, he has nothing to work with. He never really even gets a chance to go fully off the rails, as Chucky seems to just be a confused piece of hardware hellbent on doing anything and everything to make his owner happy. It doesn't ever quite register as menacing, just creepy. Chucky's been reduced from a sadistic serial killer trying to transplant his soul into the body of an unwilling child to that weird facebook mom that comments on every single one of your friends' posts. But hell, even Ma did that better.


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