Child's Play reviews: Chucky 2019 reviews are in – it's 'a killer disappointment'

The Child’s Play remake is described as a “contemporary re-imagining of the 1988 horror classic.” The movie follows Karen (played by Aubrey Plaza), a single mother who gifts her son Andy (Gabriel Bateman) a Buddi doll (voiced by Mark Hamill). But Karen is unaware of the doll’s more sinister nature.

What did critics think of the Chucky remake?

The Child’s Play remake has managed to scrape a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 60 percent.

Its critics’ 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 offers weighted average scores, gives Child’s Play 48, indicating mixed or average reviews.

Brian Lowry for CNN.com

While the movie initially features modestly clever wrinkles, the satirical and technology-inspired elements recede as the conventional slasher bits take over.

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Ed Potton for The Times

It’s a toothsome turn from Hamill, who knows a thing or two about infantilised villainy, having voiced the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series.

Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out

Not helping matters is dead-eyed snark source Aubrey Plaza, somehow less expressive than the doll itself (creepily voiced by Mark Hamill).

Charles Bramesco for the AV Club

Klevberg and Smith reduce Chucky to a malevolent automaton, his dialogue limited to parroting back someone else’s catchphrases.

Justin Chang for the Los Angeles Times

Being an AI with faulty circuitry, Chucky 2.0 doesn’t have the hilarious vulgarity or the single-minded murderous glee – the soul, if you will – that made Dourif’s Chucky such an unnervingly human abomination.

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Derek Smith for Slant Magazine

By the end, it becomes what it initially parodies: a dime-a-dozen slasher film with a silly-looking doll as the villain.

Chris Hewitt for Empire Magazine

Making a killer-doll movie out of decent component parts should have been child’s play, but this misses the mark.

Brandon Zachary for CBR

Child’s Play begins like an episode of Black Mirror and ends like an unabashed slasher film, managing to meld both tones surprisingly well.

Aja Romano for Vox

It’s silly, even nigh nonsensical, full of flat stock characters, plot non-sequiturs, and a hand-wave-y take on technological dystopia that never manages to get above eye roll levels of sincerity. But it’s also fun and funny.

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Alyse Wax for ComingSoon.net

I think that because Child’s Play carries that title, a lot of purists will go in hating it. But honestly, 2019’s Child’s Play is a lot of fun.

Britt Hayes for Birth.Movies.Death.

Child’s Play is exactly the sort of entertaining and strangely fun schlock you’d expect from a reboot of a movie about a killer doll.

Kyle Anderson for Nerdist

This Child’s Play keeps the humour dark but ditches most of the camp in favour of a stripped-down, straightforward gorefest.

Lou Thomas for Den of Geek

If the plotting and character beats are a tad obvious, what we do have is a rare beast — a fun, enjoyable rehash of some seemingly tired old horror IP.

Child’s Play is now playing in cinemas.