Child’s Play: a razor-sharp and exquisitely gruesome toy story

Child’s Play is a 2019 American horror film directed by Lars Klevberg and written by Tyler Burton Smith. It serves as a remake and reboot of the 1988 film of the same title, following a family that is terrorized by a high-tech doll that rejects its programming and becomes self-aware.

The film stars Gabriel Bateman, Aubrey Plaza and Brian Tyree Henry, with Mark Hamill as the voice of Chucky. The film was officially announced in July 2018, and is the first film featuring Chucky produced without the involvement of creator Don Mancini or actor Brad Dourif. Klevberg and Smith signed on as director and screenwriter, respectively, alongside It producers Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg.

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 60% based on 102 reviews, with an average rating of 5.79/10. The site’s critical consensus reads: “Child’s Play updates an ‘80s horror icon for the Internet of Things era, with predictably gruesome – and generally entertaining – results.” Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 47 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.

Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “C+” on an A+ to F scale, the lowest score of the series. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film 2 out of 5 stars, writing: “MIA is the original’s perverse originality.

Instead, in a misguided satire of the digital era and millennial consumerism...” Variety’s Peter Debruge wrote that “This is the new normal for horror movies: The screenplays have to seem hipper than the premise they represent, which puts Child’s Play in the weird position of pointing out and poking fun at all the ways it fails to make sense.”

Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com gave the film three out of four stars, calling it “nastier, more playful, and just as good if not better than the original film.”