A satisfying horror sequel is never quite an easy task, especially when the original is a memeified box office success. But what made the M3GAN craze was the flimsy dictation of its seriousness. At times, it felt like it was really trying to be a sincere horror film (even if it wasn’t successful), and at others, it felt like it was in on its own jokes. Now, director Gerard Johnstone is back, and “M3GAN 2.0” consists of the already established jest of its predecessor, but now emboldened by the backing of internet virality. It’s an easy thing to cater to, and that it does, with a dance number and melodramatic break into song coming around for round two to elicit laughs. And to be fair, it mostly works. M3GAN 2.0 is funny, even if cheaply, and it’s also deeply, transparently unserious this time.
While the original film straddled horror and comedy, “M3GAN 2.0” isn’t a horror film at all: it’s somewhere between comedy and sci-fi action thriller. It immediately sets this tone, opening like a CIA thriller “somewhere on the Iran-Turkish border” where we meet AMELIA (Ivana Sakhno), a M3GAN-like elevated glambot intended to be a government weapon. But her quasi-sentience and motivations come into light, and she kills her way out of federal jurisdiction, running loose in the US on a mission to commandeer all of America’s artificial intelligence.
Cady (Violet McGraw) is now an angsty 12-year-old, and Gemma (Allison Williams) is a televised figurehead against not only the advancement of AI, but technology in general, even proclaiming during a pseudo-TEDTalk, “You wouldn’t give your child cocaine. Why would you give them a smartphone?” Refusing to ever build another bot, despite a hefty offer from pompous British billionaire and tech-giant Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement), she gets backed into a corner when AMELIA hacks into his cloud access (of which he owns the majority of the country’s) and schemes towards national blackout and authoritarian takeover.
In addition, the FBI is hunting Gemma, believing her to be responsible for AMELIA’s hacked independence. This is when it’s uncovered that though M3GAN’s body has been no more, her programming has been living in the cloud, watching over Gemma and Cady the entire time. And so, the options then become AMELIA vs. the world or AMELIA vs. M3GAN 2.0—and we get a makeover montage of leg lengthening and strength training to follow.
“M3GAN 2.0” ups the ante in several ways, including vulgarity, quips per minute, and body count. M3GAN (Jenna Davis) is still funny and caustic. However, despite more creativity in the kills, there’s hardly any bloodshed (likely to preserve a PG-13 rating). Since the film is shedding its horror roots, this is much more of a pesky tease than a strong complaint, though the film would be far more exciting if it matured with its lead and indulged in full carnage.
The film chucks in a thesis on the threat of an android oligarchy, warning of the consequences of combining wealthy tech giants’ excessive ownership with their reckless advancement of artificial intelligence. It’s timely, but this modus operandi ultimately proves to be more of a justification of the plot than a motivator, and it comes to a predictable conclusion. And with a 2-hour runtime, the film is undeniably overlong, with flimsy subplots and long pauses in progression serving as nothing but more airtime for jokes to land.
“M3GAN 2.0” doesn’t seem to set out to do much more than show off and get laughs, and it accomplishes it well enough. The film is bigger, but not better, delivering precisely what fans of the sassy android will come to the theatres to see. But when it comes to potential, there was far more meat left on the bone, sacrificed to the vultures of near-certain internet virality when it could’ve been indulged in the story. Silliness and depth are not mutually exclusive, but what’s easy seems to insist upon itself.
