For a series that once featured a sex scene between two possessed dolls, the new Child’s Play remake has a lot to live up to. Already postmodern before Scream made it cool, the franchise has always been a bizarre yet compelling mix of comedy, horror and violence. When the newest installment starts, director Lars Klavberg and writer Tyler Burton Smith seem to perfectly recapture that tone, but the longer the film goes on, the more it falls apart.
The set up should be familiar to anyone familiar with the franchise. When single mother, Karen Barclay (Aubrey Plaza), and her son Andy (Gabriel Bateman) move to a new city, Karen brings home a robotic Buddi doll from her retail job as an early birthday present. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Karen, the self-named Chucky, is defective thanks to a disgruntled factory worker and the doll quickly becomes jealous and violent of Andy’s other friends.
When it starts, everything works thanks in large part to the universally good performances. Plaza is wry but likable in typical fashion and tosses off the clunky line explaining how Karen could already have a child so young with ease. Brian Tyree Henry is funny yet cunning as the Detective next door and Bateman makes his often too-clever dialogue believable despite his age. However, the biggest draw is Mark Hamill as Chucky.
Hamill’s performance as the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series is nearly as iconic as his turn as Luke Skywalker and he’s similarly enjoyable here. When Chucky comes out of the box, memory wiped from the previous family and still undeveloped, Hamill’s performance is deliberately robotic and flat. As Chucky attempts to stab Andy’s new, human friend, Pugg (Ty Consiglio), after watching the children laugh at the cartoonish violence in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel, he’s confused when Andy reacts with anger. And when Chucky gets vengeful and violent, the clear delight in Hamill’s voice makes it easy to enjoy the mayhem too. So, it’s a shame then that where Child’s Play ultimately fails is in clearly telling the audience what point all that mayhem ultimately serves.
Smith clearly has something on his mind, but his script makes it hard to pinpoint what and threads both new and from the original are left unfinished here. There’s the warning that letting Amazon stand-in, the Kaslan Corporation monopolize our lives will lead to chaos. There’s the suggestion that Chucky is the embodiment of Andy’s worst impulses and that Karen’s reaction to his hysteria is a metaphor for a parent’s fear that their child could become someone horrible. Hell, maybe it’s all just an allegory exploring the idea of nature versus nurture. They’re all intriguing ideas, but the film follows through on none of them, instead delighting in the absurdity of the core concept and the resulting violence.
Admittedly, it is probably a little silly to ask for logic when it comes to a Chucky reboot, but by not taking a little more care with the script, Child’s Play quickly squanders its potential. It’s genuinely fun to watch Andy and his friends do a Stranger Things act, but those scenes ultimately go nowhere, barely connecting to the subplot about Andy’s sense of alienation and otherness. The death of Mike’s mother Doreen (Carlease Burke), is genuinely inventive and a clever play on the danger of both self-driving cars and services like Uber, but the character is so likable and the scene so indulgently long that it quickly goes from fun to unpleasantly sadistic.
In the end, it’s hard to say whether Child’s Play is worth seeing. On one hand, it’s funny throughout, has some creative kills and the cast is universally committed and enjoyable. However, because of the slipshod storytelling, all of those elements feel wasted on a film that most will start forgetting the moment the credits roll. There’s so much to like about this newest version of Chucky, but there’s only so much you can do with a bad script.
