I tried to go in with an open mind on this one last night, but I dont know.....I appreciated that this basically was 99 percent nothing like the original film, nor the series of films as a whole......but my god, this was a fucking mess of a story that could have been so much more interesting with the tech going bad concept. I also found the majority of the comedy attempts in this to be very flat and unfunny. I may have been in the minority on this though as a guy two rows down from me was laughing more than I thought was humanly possible.
I think also what got me about this was that the characters from the Andy character to Aubrey Plaza's mom character to side players.....most were ultimately unlikable as hell but that's horror for you. Some of the moves and lines these characters made were face palming bad. Plus there was a schizophrenic pace and tone to this that kinda felt like they were throwing shit on a wall and seeing what stuck, especially as it came to the doll character. The story around the technology and how everything was connected to each other like a knock on Google Home was interesting at first, but they went too all over the place with the idea. Some of the ideas would have worked a lot better if they would have thought through the script a bit and did some revisions to tighten up what was going on with all of that.
I guess on the positive end of things, Mark Hamill certainly didn't phone in his lines as Chucky but he was given some shit to work with for sure. Most lines were just repeating other character's lines, etc. More of a robotic voice than Dourif's version but that was the idea and Hamill did well with it. But there was a few gems of lines in there. Really, as I said before, and this was obvious when watching this too, but they shouldn't have even called the doll Chucky as this felt like a totally different character without the Charles Lee Ray hook to it. That said, any referencing or homage to the original or the series was minimal at best, so again I'm like why did they even call him Chucky? The gore factor was high here too. There was alot of lazy and silly bullshit in between the kills, which at least were creative and certainly bloody. I guess that's the most praise I could give to this. The effects were pretty good at times, especially when it was obvious they had animatronics, but then they would do this bad CGI with the facial expressions of the doll and it would ruin it. The look of the doll was weird....maybe a bit creepy at times, but generally out of place. Cartoony looking and hard to accept as a positive replacement for the original Chucky look.
Now seeing how haphazardly this seemed to be put together, I get how Don Mancini and other Chucky alumni were very critical of this and didn't want to endorse this. This felt like a blatant money grab by MGM that didn't need to be made as everyone pretty much assumed.
