Unlike a majority of the horror community, I hold absolutely no love for Chucky and the Child’s Play franchise, finding the whole thing rather dumb. So when I heard they were going to remake it, I could only react with a drawn-out yawn, so much so that I only recently viewed it on a random streaming channel.
And, you know, if I’m being honest, I kind of liked it.
Whereas the 1988 original film cast Brad Dourif as a serial killer who, using the dark power of Satan, transfers his murderous soul into the plastic body of the My Buddy-like doll Chucky — it was the ’80s and, I suppose, that’s the best we could do — this reboot, revamp and retelling instead turns Chucky into a deviously programmed doll with seriously damaged AI.
When a Vietnamese tech enters some bad codes in the doll’s internal computer out of spite, the now-monikered Buddi toy heads to America, a walking and talking app designed to help every aspect of your life for the rest of your life. When single mom Karen (a miscast Aubrey Plaza) brings home a defective Buddi toy for her deaf kid, Alex (Gabriel Bateman), everything from dead housecats to self-driving vehicular manslaughter occurs.
I’m pretty sure we all know by now the doll does it, right?
Voicing this incarnation of Chucky is Mark Hamill, who does a credible job, getting rid of Dourif’s smart-ass psycho sneer and, instead, giving Chucky an aura of murderous sympathy, with Chucky just doing as he was programmed (or not programmed) to do. It’s a plot point I’m sure pissed off many murder-loving misanthropes, but I dug it.
And while this Child’s Play was largely forgotten a couple of weeks after release — and apparently there’s a new television series featuring Chucky 1.0 on the horizon — this take was an honestly brave attempt to retell a story that has long desperately needed a new storyteller. —Louis Fowler