M3GAN 2.0, the successor to the unexpectedly lucrative January release M3GAN from a couple years ago, is the cinematic equivalent of your phone prompting you to update an app that’s already functioning fine and when you open it back up, the experience is worse. It’s not as much a departure from its predecessor as last year’s wild swing Joker: Folie à Deux was compared to its preceding smash hit but different enough to categorize it as a “left turn” sequel. The closest analog would be Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which found the villain of the initial chapter reprogrammed to be the hero the second time around. Pivoting from campy horror to sci-fi action isn’t inherently a miscalculation but in this particular case, the idiosyncrasies of the first entry become lost in the homogenized genre swap.
Two years after her humanoid invention M3GAN goes haywire, roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) continues to raise her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) while now advocating for regulation of artificial intelligence. They get a not-so-friendly visit from Colonel Sattler (Timm Sharp) of the Defense Innovation Unit, who informs them that AMELIA, a military robot based on M3GAN’s coding, has just gone violently rogue. Gemma thought M3GAN had been completely wiped out but it turns out she’s been hiding within the digital confines of their smart home, waiting for the right time to emerge. With no other viable options to stop AMELIA from her killing spree, Gemma reluctantly transfers M3GAN’s consciousness to a new robotic form, with combat upgrades to boot.
M3GAN 2.0 once again features Amie Donald portraying the sassy killer doll that gives this series its name, with her voice being provided once more with glitchy hiccups by Jenna Davis. The latter is featured more this time than the former, as M3GAN doesn’t get her body back until about halfway through the story, and Davis continues to excel with caddy witticisms in line with the spirit of the original film. Also carried over are musical moments for M3GAN to showcase her skills and while the dancing sequence this time is too contrived, the instance she breaks into song is even better than the singing scenes in M3GAN. There are running bits of humor too between Gemma and Cady, the latter of whom has taken up aikido and subsequently developed an affinity for the cinematic stylings of Steven Seagal.
Taking over screenplay duties from Akela Cooper, writer and director Gerard Johnstone seems to be channeling 90s tech-action movies like T2 for M3GAN 2.0 as much as his previous film was a 21st century riff on Child’s Play. Using the finest sci-fi actioner of all time as a blueprint certainly isn’t a poor strategy but the storytelling here is much more unwieldy and convoluted, relentlessly piling on subplots and side quests to an exhausting degree. AMELIA’s capabilities are also such that it barely seems like she would need to carry out any of her plan in the physical world as opposed to just maneuvering around cyberspace. Of course that would make for a much more boring movie, so it makes more sense instead to impose limitations on what M3GAN and AMELIA can do as characters. They’re both so overpowered that the humans are effectively nullified within the story, hardly a new bug when it comes to films involving evil AI.
M3GAN‘s social commentary on how technology affects modern parenting wasn’t anything groundbreaking but it worked well within the confines of its satirical horror. Comparatively, M3GAN 2.0‘s messaging around artificial intelligence is muddled at best. There are cyphers like a tech billionaire (played by Jemaine Clement) and a Center For Safe Technology rep (played by Aristotle Athari), who finds breaks between the fighting to lecture us about the moral quandaries associated with tech. Johnstone is sadly out of his depth not only with these dramatic moments but also with the action sequences, which get redundant and tedious due to uninventive staging that doesn’t make the best use of the robot characters’ mechanics. Like the latest model of a smartphone that jettisons useful features of the previous iteration, M3GAN 2.0 reinforces the concept that newer doesn’t always equal better.
Score – 2/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Jurassic World Rebirth, a sci-fi action film starring Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, which finds a high-stakes expedition underway to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Heads Of State, an action comedy starring John Cena and Idris Elba, which follows the two world leaders who must set aside their rivalry to thwart a global conspiracy after becoming targets of a ruthless foreign adversary.
Premiering on Netflix is The Old Guard 2, a superhero movie starring Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne, picking back up with the group of immortal warriors as they grapple with the resurfacing of a long-lost entity who threatens their world.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup