Disowned by the franchise’s original creator/writer, Don Mancini, this playful reboot of the 1988 horror comedy relaunches the Chucky series, gently twisting its central conceit to reflect more contemporary anxieties. In the original Child’s Play, the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray animated the murderous doll; in this version, a beleaguered factory worker in Vietnam deliberately removes the safety protocols and violence prohibitors of a “Buddi” doll after being fired by the fictional Kaslan corporation. Like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, Buddi is an artificially intelligent, voice-controlled toy, designed to sync with all Kaslan products; immediately, the film seems to warn against technological integration, lest our devices turn on us.
The tampered-with Buddi (who goes by the name of Chucky and is voiced by Mark Hamill) ends up in the arms of Gabriel Bateman’s lonely pre-teen Andy (it’s not lost on me that he shares the name with the custodian of another famous talking toy). “I am your best friend, I am your Buddi,” he coos and he is; the two develop a prankish relationship until Chucky picks up a few ideas while watching a horror movie marathon. There are some gory moments (a man’s leg is sliced, the flesh falling off like meat from a rotisserie, and a sleazy character has a grisly encounter with a lawnmower), but the film extracts more laughs than genuine scares.
