Rating: 2.5/5
Hooptober 3.0 | 2/31 | Franchise 2/7
At the end of Child’s Play 2, we left Chuckie dead many times over — hand torn off, legs torn off, scorched in hot plastic, and head blown to smithereens. Andy and Kyle survived, walking off to some unknown future, leaving the devastated Play Pals factory in their wake.
Eight years later, in a speculative 1998, where the 90s are still very much the 90s, workers arrive at the abandoned Play Pals factory, full of cobwebs and doll parts, to clean up and re-open the factory. The workers use a crane to pull Chucky’s corpse from the adhesive pile of melted plastic. The prongs dig into the body, spilling Chucky’s blood everywhere. While dragging the body along, the blood drips into the boiling plastic, mixing with the material.
The Play Pals board meets to recap the story beats from the previous two movies. The board questions the logic of putting the Good Guy back on the market after all the lawsuits and scandals. Still, the Good Guy was their best-selling toy, and what are children, if not consumers in training? The board gifts CEO Mr. Sullivan the first doll off the assembly line to commemorate the moment.
You won’t believe this — the doll comes alive. He tortures Mr. Sullivan with toys to pad out the runtime before throwing out some inane Chucky quip and choking out Mr. Sullivan with a yo-yo. Using Mr. Sullivan’s computer, he can readily find a record of Andy, now 16, whom the state has remanded to Kent Military School after years of foster homes and juvenile delinquency.
Arriving at the school, Andy meets a fellow recruit, 8-year-old Tyler. Tyler checks the mail for any letters from his father. Instead, the officer in the mail room gives him a package addressed to Andy. The corner of the packaging tears, and Tyler sees it’s a Good Guy doll. Excitedly, he runs to the Armory to open the package in secret. Chucky comes alive, annoyed that it’s not Andy. But because of a technicality — new body and all that — Chucky can take over Tyler’s body.
The puppet work is at its worst thus far. With a lower budget and smaller timetable to make the movie — a mere nine months after the previous — all the development went towards making this as efficient as possible. They relied on computers to aid the face work, aligning with prerecorded dialogue. It works and looks pretty good, but when you have the previous movies to compare it against, the flaws come through.
The script is a rehash of story beats from the previous movies. Andy replaces Kyle, and Tyler replaces Andy, but the dynamic is the same. Screenwriter Don Manici said that he was out of ideas at that point — more accurately, his ideas were too expensive, so he scrambled to arrive at this story.
Honestly, this isn’t much worse than the previous movie — it’s predictable. The third-act set pieces are fun enough. I’m looking forward to the decidedly weirder Bride of Chucky.