Child’s Play (2019) ★★☆☆☆

This review contains spoilers.

I decided to watch this in between the second and third series of Chucky. The voodoo serial killer angle has been entirely expunged—which is not surprising for a film released in 2019—and instead Chucky is now a doll with artificial intelligence who is meant to learn as you play with him.

It initially seems like the film is going to do something with this. The first victim in the story is a Vietnamese man who commits suicide after being fired from his job assembling products for a giant American tech corporation named Kaslan. One might expect the movie to then frame the Kaslan Corporation as the ultimate villains of the story, but the Foxconn-inspired death is quickly forgotten and the only bearing this has on the rest of the film is that Chucky can magically control any and all electronics around him with his glowing E.T. finger, up to and including a self-driving car.

I don’t find A.I. Chucky very interesting. The original Chucky was never a particularly deep character but he is fun where robo-Chucky is just predictable. Every step of his journey from damaged, innocent doll to serial killer is fairly obvious in advance.

Also why did they make the doll look like James Woods.