Child’s Play (2019)

Child’s Play: Now He’s Just A Robot | 3/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 3/29/2025

The 2019 Child’s Play is an interesting reboot. A lot of reboots will try and change something to freshen things up, but it’s not often that a reboot takes only the name of the original film and the general idea of a malicious doll.

I saw this (if memory serves) on opening night with my sister. Neither of us had seen most of the Chucky movies at that point (and I think I had only seen Curse Of Chucky), so we went in with incredibly low expectations. Whatever was coming for us, we were the blankest slates we could have been. We knew the gist of who Chucky was of course, but beyond that we knew nothing but the fact that Mark Hamill was going to be the voice of the doll this time around.

For those familiar with the original film, this one will hold only a few minor points of similarity. Gabriel Bateman leads the film as Andy Barclay, but instead of being incredibly young they’ve aged him up to about fourteen years old. He lives in a small apartment with his mom Karen (Aubrey Plaza) who works at Zed Mart. Zed Mart seems to be a place that exists only to sell products from the Kaslan corporation, such as the Buddi doll. Out are the boring analogue “Good Guy” dolls of the past, the Buddi doll is fresh, robotic, and connects to the net so it can control all your Kaslan products with a wave of its finger. Despite their tight financial situation, Karen is able to acquire one of these toys after it’s returned to the store. It turns out this toy had all the AI safeguards turned off by an angry factory worker just before his death at the production facility in Vietnam. While initially the doll just seems to have a stutter and is unable to grasp basic functionality, it eventually develops a murderous tendency in the spirit of spending more time with Andy. By the end of the film Chucky has killed the family cat, Karen’s boyfriend Shane (David James Lewis), and a neighbor on the floor (Carlease Burke) who had taken a liking to Andy.

Something about this that really irks me is the change of why Chucky is evil. In the original film it’s a hokey voodoo ritual performed by a serial killer, but this time it’s just … safeguards that have been turned off by a disgruntled worker. It feels cheaper, overly modern, and removes a lot of the fun elements that made Chucky such a larger than life character that spawned a franchise. The change turns him into something that just feels like another low budget Blumhouse sortie. On top of that, reducing Chucky to the “AI kills humanity because the greatest threat to humanity is itself” style story annoys me. Watching him be a character who just wants to care about the person he was programmed to give a shit about feels … bad. He’s like a child who needs to be taught how to behave, but instead he gets shoved into a closet and told in no uncertain terms that they don’t want him.

That being said, while I don’t really think it’s a good take on the Child’s Play formula, it’s still a pretty fun movie. The jokes mostly all land, it looks pretty great, and all our actors are having a blast. Mark Hamill specifically is clearly on a roll here. In various interviews, Hamill said he recorded all the lines multiple times with different intentions behind the lines. This gave the film team the ability to stitch them all together in whatever way suited the scene best, allowing the character to gradually slip away into the killer he becomes at the end. The final scene in Zed Mart is bonkers and feels the most in line with Chucky’s spirit out of the entire film, bringing in legions of other Kaslan products to help him kill everyone else while he hunts Andy. The vengeful toy angle is one that the advertising leaned into as well, pushing ads with Toy Story characters killed by Chucky in various ways.

All told, it’s a decent film, just not a great Child’s Play. It’s worth at least a watch, despite my criticisms I’ve laid out. I had fun six years ago, and I had a decent amount of fun again this time. Diehard fans might want to stick to the classics, but it’s far from the worst horror reboot we’ve gotten in the last decade.