The Synopsis:
A mother gives her 13-year-old son a toy doll for his birthday, unaware of its more sinister nature.
The Review:
Thirty-something years after he appeared on the scene in the original Child’s Play, Chucky is still killing people. The difference now is why the little doll goes all homicidal. Perhaps it’s a cautionary tale about our own viewing habits. Even after all this time, there remains something chillingly horrifying about an out-of-control toy wielding a butcher knife, but in this tale, Chucky is only doing what it appears to make his humans happy. What he sees on TV, he does.
Andy (Gabriel Bateman), our hearing-impaired and lonely teenaged protagonist, is given a Buddi doll by his mother Karen. It just so happens that this particular toy was manufactured by a dismissed worker in Vietnam who got back at his bosses by disabling all the toy’s safety devices shortly before the worker jumped to his death. Why a toy requires safety devices that can be disabled is beyond me, but the toy gets past quality control, and off we go. It ends up in Andy’s hands in Chicago, and it learns quickly. When the doll sees Andy and his friends (Falyn and Pugg) enjoying the gore of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, its desire to please leads it to take up a knife and attempt to mimic the movie’s violence.
The ability to learn and the aforementioned disabled safeguards allow Chucky (voiced by Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame) to grow beyond the control of his owner, and that’s when all the dismembered bodies—in a tale arguably more gory and bloody than the original—start to pile up in various and sundry imaginative ways. Chucky is protective—he kills the family cat for scratching Andy—but also possessive. Chucky’s not possessed—this is more about technology out of control than evil spirits—and in this regard, the movie differs from its predecessor. Yet, because nobody believes a doll is capable of such things, Andy is a prime suspect in the murders.
Things go further awry, to the point that Chucky ends up threatening Karen. Andy comes to the rescue, and even when he and his friends overpower and kill Chucky, you’re never certain that the doll is gone for good.
As you should surmise by now, Child’s Play does not earn Dove approval.
