M3GAN wasn’t born — or built, or whatever — to play it safe. Gerard Johnstone’s 2022 tech-toy horror is, charitably, a good time, the sort of movie you throw on with friends over a handful of edibles and a bottle of wine or two. M3GAN’s success came courtesy of its commitment toward delivering on its B-movie promises; it winks along with the audience, but never enough to make you feel like the joke’s on you. Pay the ticket to see a murder doll’s bitchy one-liners, yuk it up, and return the favor with your best quip on Letterboxd. The movie proved to be a Snakes on a Plane for the TikTok set, and credit where it’s due, it struck lightning: M3GAN earned its budget back tenfold at the box office. A sequel was all but inevitable, then, and the promise of M3GAN jumping the shark is tantalizing enough. Instead, M3GAN 2.0 is a buggy firmware update that corrupts its own magic.
The sequel finds Gemma (Allison Williams), M3GAN’s creator, wrestling with a bit of Oppenheimer syndrome — after all, the doll she’d built to protect her niece went on a killing rampage that took the lives of four humans and one dog. Gemma hasn’t quite turned her back on tech, but she did parlay a series of unlikely victories in courtrooms and talking-head interviews into a crusade to warn the general public against the dangers of artificial intelligence. Her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), is handling the trauma of the last movie as best as a teen can, hopping from school to therapy to martial arts lessons while nursing an interest in computer science that Gemma does her best to tamp down. While aunt and niece work to rebuild their lives, though, M3GAN’s code falls into a rogue defense contractor’s hands. Enter AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), a blood-thirsty, yassified AI who defies her creators and embarks on a rampage to take Earth for the machines.
That plot sounds simple, but M3GAN 2.0 bends its mechanized spine backward to gum up the gears. A lineage of sci-fi sequels from Terminator 2 to Matrix Reloaded makes Gemma and Cady’s mission clear: Revive M3GAN (played again by Amie Donald, with voice by Jenna Davis), whose programming has been lurking in their smart home, endure the sass, and sic robot on robot. The switch from tech threat to antihero machine is sweaty but familiar enough for an audience to swallow; still, Johnstone bookends each set piece with so much exposition that utilitarian dialogue often runs longer than the action itself. Here a rundown of AMELIA’s access to a global cloud network, there a profile of a lab’s high-class security system, all at the expense of an audience who likely showed up as a joke. The goofball conceits of a murder doll franchise don’t allow tolerance for boredom, but M3GAN 2.0’s two-hour runtime is about 40 minutes too heavy on time spent waiting simply for something to happen.
Part of that might be an issue of scope. AI has taken such a dominant seat in public discourse that it’s only natural to increase the aperture in order to enter the conversation properly, but Johnstone never quite nails a target with precision. M3GAN 2.0 ups the ante to tackle AI within the military complex. We meet AMELIA as she breaks protocol during an underwritten mission fighting terrorists in Saudi Arabia, a segment that doubles as a Y2K throwback by way of early-aughts jingoism. Later, Gemma contends with a slimy billionaire investor played competently by Jemaine Clement, whose Musk surrogate would have ostensibly offered a good one-liner or two with some punch-up. With IRL tech lords actively stepping into the ring of defense contracts, AI in the military and cretinous wealth hoarders are worthy targets of satire. But M3GAN 2.0 never allows itself the curiosity to elevate observational comedy from rote observation, leaving jokes on the table as its attention scatters toward the next half-baked idea.
Ultimately, though, people line up to see M3GAN to see the doll, and the doll delivers. The first M3GAN proved magnetic from the strength of its character work, which reupholsters the absurdity of Child’s Play for a generation that grew up with Mean Girls DVDs on their shelves. For what it’s worth, the sequel is largely able to retain what made watching that viral-dancing toy so fun in the first place. A genre shift from horror to action-comedy means M3GAN’s kills are fewer and farther between, but her wit remains sharp as a butcher knife. Johnstone’s strongest writing comes via M3GAN’s dialogue, which consistently scores the movie’s biggest laughs, whether she’s serenading Gemma with a Kate Bush song or calling her boyfriend a virtue-signaling snowflake (M3GAN is, after all, a product of machine learning). One great character design isn’t quite enough to save a movie, but M3GAN’s return to form is a nice consolation for crowds with the fortitude to show up to a January slasher’s summertime sequel.
But perhaps most relevant to any assessment of M3GAN 2.0 is the fact that artificial intelligence has witnessed a commercial explosion in the time between the original and its sequel. While predecessors of the M3GAN franchise saw robot armies and cyborg overlords in the tea leaves, AI has instead crept in as a watering down of the human experience — art and work life, social media and customer service, healthcare and insurance claims, all polluted with a touch of gray that replaces connection with a nauseous loneliness. For all its missteps, M3GAN 2.0 does at least manage to capture the essence of what AI has done with pop culture — a tired dilution of its own spark.
DIRECTOR: Gerald Johnstone; CAST: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Brian Jordan Alvarez Amie Donald, Jenna Davis; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: June 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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