Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Child’s Play’ on Amazon Prime, a Remake That Transforms Chucky Into a Symbol of Harmful Interconnectedness

Funny how the 2019 Child’s Play remake is now streaming free for Amazon Prime subscribers, and the movie aims its satirical sights at a corporation that looks a heck of a lot like Amazon. Also funny, how most horror regurgitations barely justify their existence, but this one upgrades the original concept — a serial killer uses a voodoo curse to transfer his soul into a doll — to a relevant neo-tech angle: Chucky, welcome to the internet of things!  

CHILD’S PLAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Kaslan Corp is selling buttloads of its new electronic doll toy, Buddi, to millions of people who aren’t at all disturbed by its grody, distorted face and forcibly cheerful and subtly demented robot voice (courtesy Mark Hamill). “Home synergy” is one of Buddi’s features, which means he interacts with your phone, TV, speaker, smartposthole digger, bluetoothbrush, e-TP holder and whatever else people have connected to the internet for no logical reason. Buddi is manufactured in a dimly lit Vietnamese factory, where a worker, angry at being fired for loafing about like a total loafer, reprograms a doll, deleting its safety features, which I think means Buddi must be some sort of AI that learns things and can build upon its experiences, and therefore needs something to stop it from adopting malfeasant traits. There’s probably a movie here, exploring why someone would create a commercial product with potentially malfeasant traits that need protocols to stop them, but the dystopian-AI-movie market is kinda flooded right now.

Instead, Child’s Play (2019) explores a different flooded movie market, the one where a single mom and her kid become tangled in a horror plot. Karen (Aubrey Plaza) works at Zed Mart, a discount store that looks like an ancient abandoned Turn Style location rented out for a movie production with a tight budget. She feels bad that her 13-year-old son, Andy (Gabriel Bateman), has no friends because they just moved into an apartment that looks slightly out of the range of affordability for a Zed Mart customer service counterperson. So she snatches a defective Buddi from the return truck, and bestows the hottest toy of the year upon poor, unsuspecting Andy.

Buddi names himself Chucky, and soon connects himself to Andy’s heart by following him around everywhere and endearing both of them to the neighbor kids, Falyn (Beatrice Kitsos) and Pugg (Ty Consiglio). The kids and Chucky watch an old Texas Chainsaw movie, which gives him some ideas, especially with regards to Andy’s family cat, Mickey Rooney, who’s a shithead, and also Karen’s new boyfriend (David Lewis), a human carbuncle who drinks all her beer but won’t eat her cookies, which I think is a euphemism. Are they doomed? I ain’t saying, but maybe you can guess. What about the booger-eater of an incel of a maintenance guy (Trent Redekop) who e-spies on the apartment-building residents? Or the friendly cop down the hall, Mike (Brian Tyree Henry), and his mom (Carlease Burke)? No spoilers, but the internet of things is now the internet of death!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This Child’s Play starts like E.T. and ends like Alien, with some A.I. Artificial Intelligence-isms in the middle.

Performance Worth Watching: I dunno, highlighting performances in a Chucky movie is like going to Benji’s birthday party — everyone plays second fiddle to the non-human in the room. Hamill reasserts himself as an underappreciated voiceover artist (although casting Haley Joel Osment would have been more clever). Henry is a source of solid comedy, although he’s officially not given enough to do. And Plaza does her usual detached-snark thing, which can be intermittently amusing.

Memorable Dialogue: Andy’s lament: “Pity compliments from a talking doll. That’s my life.”

Sex and Skin: Skin… ripped off a guy’s face!

Our Take: For a bad-taste violence-is-funny horror-comedy, Child’s Play Twenty Nineteen is reasonably amusing, blending sitcom scenarios with ’80s slasher stupidity and modern themes that explore, via allegory, how society’s inveterate technological interconnectedness will KILL THE HELL OUT OF US ALL! The internetification of our lives is compromising our privacy, mental health and relationships, an idea here represented by a homicidal animatronic doll pushing a guy off an extension ladder, causing gruesome compound fractures, and then using an iRototiller to rip his face off.

Some stray observations: Mike the Cop is apparently the only detective in the tri-state area, or wherever this story is set, because he shows up at all the murder scenes regardless of jurisdiction. Tonally, the film never ever ever ever ever takes itself seriously, so it’s at least consistent. Initially, it’s hard to denounce Chucky’s actions, because he only targets a-holes. And the movie ends with an irreverent scene of consumer frenzy as ding-dongs clamor and scrap for the new line of Buddi 2 dolls like it’s the Cabbage Patch Riots of 1983. Childs Play Two-Oh-One-Nine is easy-target satire, but is at least occasionally funny and light on its feet. It’s an iota of a hair better than it has any reason to be.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Color me surprised: This Child’s Play is only a slight waste of time, instead of a total waste of time. It’d lose the deathmatch against the 1988 original, though.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Child's Play (2019) on Amazon Prime