Child’s Play (2019)

Title: Child’s Play

Year: 2019

Genre: Horror |

Runtime: 90 min

Director: Lars Klevberg

Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Hamill, Gabriel Bateman

6,7/10

A mother gives her 13-year-old son a toy doll for his birthday, unaware of its more sinister nature.

DECENT BUT WOULD BE GREAT WITHOUT CHUCKY

For starting, I must say that I’m a big Chucky-fan and I have followed the film-series from the beginning. I loved the original 1988, a Tom Holland flick and that’s why I was so excited about this remake. When it comes to this kind of revisions of beloved classics, the filmmakers should have the fan very close in mind and respect what made them love it, in the first place. They are the people they mostly aiming for because they’re the ones who most probably go to it. This doesn’t mean the filmmakers can’t use their creativity rights while making it, no not at all, go with the gut, but respect the fans. That is where this movie comes in…

I really loved the second and third acts while annoyed on the first. For me, Chucky is more than a doll. The original, he is Charles Lee Ray; the serial killer doing whatever he wants to wake terror, even putting his soul into a Good guy doll. In this remake, he is a malfunctioning toy thanks to a mentally ill man from Vietnam. This really threw me off bad at the beginning and it was a short scene too. We just see the man’s boss being mean to him and saying that he’s fired, so this apparently makes him go “over the edge” and program the doll he is working on to be as mean and violent as possible. Then the man jumps from a window while the doll puts into the cargo to America.

I must be honest that this really annoyed me, this is NOT Chucky. It has been a lot of revisions to Chucky’s character and name, from his original terror persona to his funnyman personality in the later films. They have been both good and bad, but it always was Charles Lee Ray in the body of the doll. That’s what made him so scary, from the start we know that it’s a murderer deceiving everybody. Whatever he said or did in his Good Guy persona we knew from the start wasn’t true, that made it more nervously how close he came to characters.

In this one, he is just a destructive toy, not as personal as the serial murderer we got to know. But I admit that I like and understand the premise with how depending we are to technology and how dangerous potential A.I  could be today; everything is connected and with the cloud. This is what this A.I Chucky is using to start chaos and murder, looking like a toy-Jedi-Thanos controlling TVs and remote toys with razorblades by snapping his fingers. I also like how funny this movie when some real knee-slapping humor to land the satire parts, thanks to a lot of the cast’s comedic past.

I liked Aubrey Plaza in this role as the young mother. She is funny and can give a dramatic performance when needed to. The rest of the cast, I liked them too, but no one really stood out to be one of the main memorable parts of this film, that even includes the great Mark Hamill as Chucky, great impression but he didn’t get a lot of room to flex his acting-muscles.

The productions is fine, the doll mechanics looks cool and feels like an update to the character but not as revolutionary as the original doll were. The cinematography and props were also alright but not something that made the film stand out. That were the story, like I mentioned in the headline, it would be so much better if the filmmakers took the Chucky part out and made it about a another doll character that don’t have much of legacy as Chucky, then this film wouldn’t be as offensive to the source material and be more a likable horror. The message is good and the execution decent. It’s kind of funny and scary, just leave our favorite satanic little fucker out of it, like you did with the man behind him.