M3GAN 2.0 Review

There was a time when horror mascots took multiple movies to find their way to icon status. But from the moment M3GAN sashayed her way toward impaling Ronny Chieng, it felt like the dancing murder robot had years of sequels and snark ahead of her. Her limitless reserves of generative smartassery and a tendency to break into song – along with her thematically rich echoes of the real-world debate over artificial intelligence – plug directly into M3GAN 2.0, which widens the scope and ups the ante of its predecessor, while adding some new ideas and even different types of movies into its programming. But as with any big update, some errors have crept their way into the code.

At the very top of the sequel’s patch notes is a crystal-clear modulation of genre. From the moment the words “Somewhere on the Turkish/Iranian border” are splayed across M3GAN 2.0’s very first shot, it’s clear what’s to follow will be a far cry from the relatively modest, tongue-in-cheek horror movie that preceded it. So long to the robo rampage that merely threatened the lives of anyone who got between the fabulous supertoy and her human charge, Cady (Violet McGraw); hello to the global threat posed by the military-grade android AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno). AMELIA’s murky motives put her on a collision course with Cady, her aunt/adoptive mother Gemma (Allison Williams) and, eventually, M3GAN, and Sakhno gets off to a good start in the role, with a cold and imposing stature bearing none of the campy parasocial bestie vibes M3GAN invites. But as her goal starts to take shape, it becomes clear there’s little interest in making AMELIA a compelling character in her own right. No, this is very much an upgraded villain limited to a T-1000 “search and destroy” ethos.

A few years on from M3GAN’s buggy and bloody launch, Gemma and Cady (Violet McGraw) have found a more stable domestic groove, and with that, ways to cope. Their relationship benefits from how they’ve each grown and matured – Gemma advocates for digital detoxing while Cady studies the attack-diverting martial art of Aikido – and Williams and McGraw have a believable parent/teen dynamic that gives director Gerard Johnstone something to come back to as the stakes rise to apocalyptic proportions. M3GAN wasn’t subtle about positioning its titular character as a stand-in for an overreliance on smart devices, and M3GAN 2.0 similarly hammers us over the head with emphatic pleas against unchecked AI. That’s a well-intentioned and salient point, but it’s expressed through a cartoonishly extreme yin-yang of tech-bro send-ups: party animal/cybernetics magnate Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement) and Gemma’s insufferably boring AI-watchdog boyfriend, Christian (Aristotle Athari). They muddy the waters with tossed-off observations about the state of the technology that feel far too one-dimensional and short-sighted.

Much as M3GAN’s first outing paid homage to the formula of Child’s Play (acknowledgement of the tech-forward 2019 remake goes here), M3GAN 2.0’s villain-turned-ally setup and pontifications on human/machine relations would’ve been enough to raise Terminator 2: Judgment Day comparisons on their own. By the time the characters are planning the infiltration of a tech campus, it feels like Johnstone is a little too beholden to what I think is the very best sci-fi action movie ever made. By shifting the genre focus, M3GAN 2.0 loses the benefit of being a horror movie using great jokes to punch above its weight, and instead feels more like a sci-fi movie straining to make the most of its budget. This can work: Happy Death Day 2U took the original’s time-looped slasher concept and blew it out into a full-on time-travel comedy – that yes, still had some slashing in there. Serviceable though M3GAN 2.0’s action may be – and there are some occasionally clever uses of both M3GAN and AMELIA’s abilities – there are only so many black-ops goons they can knock out or run through with sharp objects before it all becomes a bit repetitive.

It’s a good thing then that it’s still centered around the reigning queen of passive aggressive asides and burns. The sequel goes through growing pains as it jettisons its horror DNA to make space for more sci-fi and action elements, but M3GAN herself comes out on the other side quite well. Johnstone builds up some good anticipation for her return through the first act, hinting at her persisting consciousness through some clever use of smart-home devices that remind us of both her wide-ranging capabilities and her venomous wit. M3GAN 2.0 stretches to explain why M3GAN would want to give up the freedom of transcending a physical form, but she’s such a reliably delightful presence that it’s a forgivable logic jump. Plus, she’s an inherently physical being onscreen: through multiple, spectacularly realized hardware versions in M3GAN 2.0, M3GAN conveys menace and/or humor, with the slightest change of expression. And that’s before you even get to dizzying physiological questions like why she needs to confidently toss a towel over her shoulder after a tough workout (other than that being a hilarious way to exit the frame.)

On the more emotional region of M3GAN’s hard drive, there’s not as much schmaltz as you may expect from an android yearning for humanity, even as M3GAN’s feelings on the subject gain a lot more nuance when she’s given a second chance to protect Cady. M3GAN approaches her own autonomy with, dare I say it, humility. It’s nice to see M3GAN grapple with these questions in a way that’s realistic and true to the character.

There’s some irony worth noting here that M3GAN’s success as a cinematic creation comes down entirely to the craftspeople and artists responsible for bringing her to life. Jenna Davis’ stellar voice work and Amie Donald’s continually impressive physical performance, the seamless animatronic and visual effects, Johnstone’s deadpan one-liners steeped in the persona established in Akela Cooper’s M3GAN screenplay – all of it represents very human work that succeeds in elevating the character into a franchise standard-bearer, even through her sophomore outing fails to keep all the plates around her spinning.