Horror sequels tend to operate on a rinse-and-repeat cycle: You loved it when Michael/Jason/Freddy/Ghostface/Chuckie did the thing. Now here’s them doing it for the second time. Or the third. Or the 10th. Occasionally, creators get ambitious and/or ridiculous — hey, let’s do a crossover! And then send one of them to space! — but usually, the idea is to deliver something along the lines of what got fans scared, excited, etc., in the first place. Add some Roman numerals and keep it the same until the inevitable meta-reboot. Only the masks occasionally change.
To their credit, the good folks behind M3GAN 2.0 did not stick to the usual Part II plan. They could have picked the easy route, simply bringing back their psychotic Kewpie doll from the 2022 hit and having her do a fan-service act. A little stabby-stabby here, a few breaks for campy asides there, several reprises of the now-iconic dance. Instead, they opted for an unexpected, but equally familiar off-road sequel experience. The Model 3 Generative Android with a penchant for mayhem has returned. But now she’s … an action hero.
So yes, despite getting a screwdriver right in her motherboard at the end of the previous film, the ‘bot is back, and she’s kicking ass, and wingsuit flying off cliffs, and engaging in all sorts of Mission: Impossible-style shenanigans around Silicon Valley. Conceptually, you can see how this might be an interesting switch-up. Execution-wise? Woo, boy. Recasting her from potential slasher-flick franchise superstar to something like M3GAN Bond must have felt like an upgrade. The result is more like the Microsoft Bob of horror sequels. Her model is 2.0. The overbaked, underwhelming, narratively restless movie itself is 0.0 percent watchable.
Long story short: There’s a new doll in town. Short story extended painfully, sluggishly long: The original M3GAN, now just a floating sentience who shows up on smart devices to make catty passive aggressive comments, must be uploaded to a bigger, faster, better kung fu-fighting machine so she can taker her on. Gemma (Allison Williams), her creator, has now become a leading anti-AI activist. Cady (Violet McGraw), the youngster who was M3GAN’s owner, is still traumatized by her companion-robot going rogue, but now she knows aikido. Somehow, the blueprint for Gemma’s pet project found its way into the hands of the military, who’ve used it to create weaponized droids. The prototype, named Amelie (Ivanna Sakhno), has been lent out to Saudi intelligence for a mission. It does not go as planned. Amelie overrides her prime directive and begins enacting her main agenda, which is to get uploaded into cyberspace and take over all online networks in the name of world domination, yadda yadda yadda.
There are douchebag FBI agents and generic, heavily accented thugs, along with a wolf-in-sheepskin-parkas tech bro (Aristotle Athari) and a tech billionaire (Jermaine Clement) who’s a composite of several different horrible IRL overlords but could really just be named Melon Tusk. Speaking of names: Big up to writer-director Gerard Johnstone for planting a MacGuffin in a 1980s company who started out making copiers and then became an innovator in other technological fields, and calling it Xenox. We have no idea what actual company that is supposed to be based on. (That said, we do applaud his visual Metropolis shout-out during one of the film’s dozen climaxes.)
You also get Williams gamely pivoting between worried expressions and very worried expressions; so many narrative “twists” and plot-revelation switchbacks that you may want to start keeping a chart as things progress; and boredom. Two assistants, played by Jen Van Epps and Brian Jordan Alvarez, coded as angels and devils sitting on Gemma’s shoulders, yet coming off more as characters who weren’t able to finish being sketched out because apparently a tight deadline was looming. Several Chekhovian guns — a neuro-chip, an exo-skeleton, some sort of thing that could shut down rebellious robots before they throw a toxic amount of shade — are placed on the proverbial mantle, with giant neon arrows pointing down at them.
What you won’t get in M3GAN 2.0 is scares, Oh-Snap worthy bon mots or any semblance of fun. Apart from our anti-heroine breaking into an impromptu rendition of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work,” there’s little to no presence of what made the original movie both a gas for genre fanatics and the sort of kitschy, knowing wink-nudge that’s ripe for communal memes. We would have killed to see a feature-length version of this fictional I.P. continuation instead of a poor man’s action flick. Its as if the folks behind the first film felt that it was the doll that mattered more than anything else, and that she was beloved enough to simply be dropped into any kind of story and viewers would happily lap it up. Copycat entries can certainly bleed franchises dry. Ones that forget or ignore what made something work from the start, however, can kill them. Suddenly, a generic rerun of the 1.0 version doesn’t seem like such a bad offer.
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