This movie shouldn’t be called Child’s Play. Call it anything else. Hell, call it Blood Buddy, which was the original title of Child’s Play. This isn’t a bad movie. It’s a decent horror flick that I would likely give a moderately positive review if it was called something else. However, they decided to call this Child’s Play and, folks, this ain’t Child’s Play.
Because I enjoy talking about this shit, I first want to discuss the very weird situation this movie has created. Skip this paragraph if you don’t care about background information. In all other cases, a remake only happens when the original series has ended. However, the original Child’s Play series hasn’t ended and there are more movies and even a tv show planned with the original Chucky. How the fuck is there now a Child’s Play multiverse? Corporate bullshit, that’s how. The original Child’s Play was released by MGM in 1988. It was a big hit and obviously lent itself to becoming a franchise, so the studio immediately greenlit Child’s Play 2. However, MGM was in the process of being bought by an Australian company called Quintex, and the head guy at Quintex hated horror movies. In order to appease that guy, MGM halted Child’s Play 2 and put the series up for sale. That resulted in a bidding war with every major studio wanting to make sequels, and it was none other than Steven Spielberg himself that brokered the deal to make Universal the new home of Chucky. By the way, Quintex never even bought MGM because the head guy (the one that hated horror movies) failed to make a $50 million down payment on the deal, then had to flee Australia due to rampant charges of corporate fraud and eventually died in Spain. In the following decades, MGM was bought and restructured so many times by different corporations and investment groups that even MGM didn’t know what the fuck they owned anymore. So, a couple of years ago, they hired some lawyers to look through their intellectual property to figure out what they actually owned the rights to. They discovered a long-forgotten caveat in the Child’s Play deal that stipulated that, even though Universal could make Child’s Play sequels in perpetuity, MGM still technically owned the rights to the original film. To further confuse things, MGM farmed the production to Orion Pictures because MGM and Orion (along with Annapurna Pictures) have an agreement to collectively release movies under the United Artists label. So Universal still owns the original Chucky (but not the original movie), while this version is financed by MGM, made by Orion and released by United Artists. Did you fucking get all of that?
So, the movie. We begin at a Vietnamese factory that is producing Buddi dolls, which is the hot new toy. A factory worker is tired of taking shit from his asshole boss, so he switches one of the dolls into evil mode and then kills himself. I’m not sure how that gets back at the boss, but whatever. This is pretty much exactly like that Simpsons Halloween special where the doll just needs to have its switch flipped from “evil” to “good.” The doll makes its way to America, a mother buys it for her son and things pretty much go as you would expect if you saw that Simpsons episode.
The biggest problem is Chucky. You can take some liberties with an iconic character, but this isn’t anywhere close to being the same character. Actually, he isn’t even a character at all because he isn’t alive in this version, he’s just a product of odd programing. In the original, Chucky is the reincarnation of a serial killer, a feat achieved with voodoo. He was a person in a doll’s body and acted with an actual personality as a result. Here, he isn’t even a doll. He’s a robot, basically Siri in doll form. When a doll talks and moves, it’s creepy. It’s not creepy when a robot does it because that’s exactly what it’s supposed to fucking do. Since it’s a robot, Chucky is pretty much stoic and monotone the whole time and isn’t really even evil. He has no personality whatsoever and isn’t evil because he’s just following his programming. That is not Chucky. I get that’s it’s a modern spin on the concept, and maybe even a clever idea, but it just isn’t Chucky.
Aside from comparisons to the original, I don’t really understand this Chucky. This toy company gave this doll the ability to become completely self-aware and make its own decisions? That’s some serious technology to include in a fucking toy. It also starts out by just going after people that have been mean to Andy (the kid that owns him), but then he kinda just starts doing whatever at a certain point. If he isn’t actually evil and he isn’t just trying to protect the kid, then what the hell is he doing? What is the endgame here? Chucky has no goal, no motivation and no personality.
I have some nice-to-mixed things to say about it. It certainly isn’t boring and moves at a good pace. There are also some decent gore scenes in it. The acting is all fine. Aubrey Plaza is in this and, since she is one of the most gorgeous women alive, her performance is flawless and worthy of consideration from the academy. Mark Hamill, however, is a disappointment. It’s not his fault, though. He just has little to work with because Chucky never becomes nearly as animated as he does in the original. For everyone that just thinks of Hamill as Luke Skywalker, he is also a highly-accomplished voice actor. Most notably, he has been the voice of the Joker in cartoons and video games since the early 90s. He was perfect for this role and its truly sad that he wasn’t given something more interesting to do. That is a lot of wasted potential.
This isn’t a bad movie, but it is a terrible remake. I get that Child’s Play is an established brand that will help put asses in the seats, but this movie shoots itself in the foot by associating itself with the original movie. Even if this is successful, it will probably take MGM some time to figure out of they own the rights to make a Child’s Play 2 and, if so, what characters can appear in it. And if a team of lawyers analyzing your intellectual property contracts isn’t a spark for creative inspiration, then I don’t know what is.
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