Child's Play

Rating: Null/10 (6 April 2017)

I'm not here to review a movie. I see little point. Give me deconstruction any day. I'd rather sink my teeth into the meat of a carcass than read about its pretty colors.
I struggle with this movie. This is nowhere as near as straight up as Kiss, Kiss, not that KKBB was straight up in the usual sense.
We have an on-screen diatribe during the movie's opening against the advanced sexual & social knowledge we're giving our kids and then the movie doesn't stop doing that very same thing to our favorite character... but yet she holds her moral center... at 13 years-old. The age bridge between child innocence and adult awareness.
No wonder she's our favorite.
There are a ton of reviews on this site against her presence in many scenes without anyone realizing that was half the point. Who commented on the young teen boy bragging about his dick size?
So we as viewers are watching and thus made as complicit as her Dad as to what she experiences, as to what we see her see. (And we are also told with the opening porn star scene that this movie is a typical male fantasy--another anti-Hollywood comment)
We all think of ourselves as innocent and as principled as that tough young girl. Lol. Can a truer observation about social media be made? She wins, and we feel we do too (all while an unspoken bird gets mentions).
And too... Message movies as porn. That's like popping Hollywood one on the nose just right there. From a movie that purports multiple messages and blatantly so, this is reflexive satire at the highest degree.
This is deliberate in its parallels to KKBB, its parent. I think it is intended to be a meta-movie on top of that movie, which in itself was an indictment of Hollywood. The inexcusably flat trailer for this effort tells me that Hollywood is sick of being the villain.
Too bad because the villainy is far more complex than any Darth Vader. It's The Tempest meets Moulin Rouge... A self-aware hurricane blowing down upon the bloody red mill of Hollywood.
And this meta-ness explains the film running away in ridiculous ways from our avatars at the end.
It's a mystery movie, but not the mystery we're ostensibly given. And in this meta-age there isn't a good ostensible mystery we should ever trust to be straight up.
There's no way the guy who could already give us a lethal weapon when he was in college is giving us the same kung fu today.
Think the mystery through. I know I'm not done yet.