Two years after serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) inserted his soul into a Chucky doll, a toy company attempts to re-create the doll, bringing Ray back in the process. The possessed doll, intent on claiming a human body, kills his way toward former owner Andy (Alex Vincent), who now lives in a foster home. Andy's foster sister, Kyle (Christine Elise), tries to protect him, but his foster parents believe Andy is just a troubled kid -- and Chucky's murderous path continues.
Child's Play 2 is one of those films where the sequel is as good (if not better) than the original film. This was helped massively by a slight alteration to the Chucky's personality. From this point onwards, Chucky brings a very dark sense of humour to the franchise, with a lot of very smooth and quippy one-liners to go along with his serial-killing escapades.
Brad Dourif went into the studio and recorded all of Chucky's lines before filming started, so you do have to have a fair amount of respect for this man that is able to put forward such effective voicework with minimal context, and no visuals associated. Hats off to the animatronics department who also did a bang-up job of syncing Chucky's lip movements with that of Dourif's recordings. In fact, Chucky's entire aesthetic was on point. The movements worked well, and the facial expressions were very impressive.
It's nice to have a horror franchise with recurring characters. Sure, you get characters in other horror films like Michael Myers, Leather Face, and Jason Voorhees that come back time after time, but without dialogue, there's nothing towards their character development than a killer. Chucky is in a completely different ballpark. He gets his own story arc each time, and while limited, it still gives you more to pay attention to as he has a motivation; when you have a reasoning behind it, it leaves room for that motivation to change if circumstances change, and that brings uncertainty into the mix. Integral for good suspense.
But aside from Chucky, we also get the return of Andy (played again by Alex Vincent), and this sequel is a direct sequel that continues on from the first film, referencing it several times. Slasher flicks having recurring protagonists is a very rare thing to have. While Andy's mum does not return in this story, Christine Elise does an exceptional job taking over that maternal role as the fellow rebellious foster child, Kyle.
What is a little bit odd with continuing on with the story is how they pretty much disregard most of what happens in the first film and effectively redo the same plot with a different collection of cast members. So again, we get half of the film where Chucky is pretending to be an inanimate object when other people are around, which is a direct contradiction to how he was at the end of the last film. After him being outed, you would expect the film to jump into the action quicker, but the film instead focuses a lot of the internal dramas of foster care.
This reversion back to the same plot as the first film feels like an attempt to stick to a winning formula, but it really just ends up slowing the pace down. On the upside, Andy is aware right from the start, and it gives us a different perspective on his relationship with Chucky.; specifically, a more offensive and pre-emptive direction.
The film really jumps in pace once the reveal happens for a second time, and the battle can really begin. The violence and deaths are much more effective and sadistically twisted (off-set slightly by Chucky's black humour), and the scale of the environment is increased in magnitudes. It all builds towards the climax of the film, which is designed really well. Creating a labyrinthine area with a multitude of hazards and obstacles was a brilliant choice in writing and set design, and it really pays off well.
Child's Play 2 is well-balanced, and while I was a bit disappointed to see it following the same tropes it went through in the original film that came out only two years prior, I loved how they tried their best to maintain the continuity of the story and managed to increase the danger level of Chucky.