Child's Play 2 (1990)

Child's Play 2 arrives two years after its predecessor with a mandate that can be stated plainly: reassemble the doll, put him back to work, and see if the stockholders calm down. The Play Pals Corporation does exactly this, and the film treats the decision as grim corporate housekeeping. A worker dies on the assembly line within minutes. Nobody in the boardroom loses sleep. This is the closest the picture comes to social commentary, and it lasts roughly as long as it takes to electrocute a man. The thread of corporate appetite dangles there, never pulled.

What follows is a slasher assembled with workmanlike competence and no apparent ambition beyond the next kill. Christine Elise's Kyle is a cynical foster teen who swears, steals, and eventually rams an air hose down the villain's throat. She is a capable co-survivor, and the film grants her the final blow. The mechanics that produce her, however, are the standard final-girl economics of the genre. She exists to be useful in the third act, not to make an argument. Jenny Agutter and Grace Zabriskie are dispatched with the efficiency of a production that knows precisely what it is.

The film has no interest in instructing anyone. It says nothing about race, nothing about the climate, nothing about the body, nothing about the mind. Andy's trauma is a device that gets him placed in a foster home and then gets him chased. The cast is uniformly white and the film never notices, because the subject does not arise. Gene Siskel gave it zero stars and called it a vicious, ugly little thriller. He was not wrong, and he was also not the audience. The picture opened at number one in the United States and returned its budget twice over. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no invitation to self-improvement. Just a doll, a factory, and a high-pressure hose.