Unlike Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Frankenstein, or plenty of other horror icons, M3GAN didn’t burst onto the scene like a lumbering, silent menace. No, this gabby doll strutted across our screens like a goddamn diva. The key appeal 2022’s M3GAN is the camp quality of being killed by a machine who is just as lethal with a mean-girl putdown as she is a machete. Still, she had a machete. She also made for a clever metaphor about the way parents are surrendering their children’s minds to technology.
The knowledge of how well that humor worked proves to be both the next model’s best weapon and greatest liability. M3GAN 2.0 definitely ups the cutting asides, the shock comic one-liners, and even the singing, but it also favors lightness to such a degree that writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper (who returns only for a “story by” credit this time) end up taking their jackpot creation out of the horror space entirely. With more in common now with Ethan Hunt than Freddy Krueger, M3GAN has become a synthetic superhero, or at least antihero—who also like Tom Cruise is out to save us from even more threatening AI. In that way, she also exists in a storyline that bears a striking resemblance to Terminator 2, although it feels tonally more apiece with ‘80s high-concept adventure flicks like WarGames and Short Circuit. That isn’t necessarily a full complaint, mind, but it does acknowledge this is a downgrade, especially as the pointed social satire about letting an app parent your kid is essentially recanted.
To be sure, Allison Williams’ Aunt Gemma is still the worst when it comes to taking care of her niece/veritable daughter, Cady (Violet McGraw). Hardly a day passes between Gemma discovering her homicidal AI, the so-called M3GAN, is still “alive” and Gemma slowly coming around to relying on M3GAN’s help to keep Cady safe from a new threat, as we all as communicating with the tween about what Gemma really means to say. In that way, our heroine is a bit like the modern college kid who can no longer fathom what it is to a paper without ChatGPT filling in the blanks.
The movie sets up some darkly amusing commentary there, but the film isn’t particularly interested in exploring that subtext when there’s the flashy neon shimmer of M3GAN’s charisma to enjoy. And yes, it is good to have M3GAN back on the screen as soon as possible and as physically played by actress/dancer Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis with an ever winning rope-a-dope formula that bounces between singsong friendliness and sudden, devastating haymakers in cattiness. The first act of M3GAN 2.0 therefore rushes through the muddled reasons of why and how she’s back. It’s a bit hazy after the fact, but I think it has something to do the U.S. government accidentally creating an AI assassin codenamed AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) with M3GAN’s source code. AMELIA then, of course, immediately goes rogue by attacking the big tech masters who made her, including a scenery-chewing Jemaine Clement.
In the aftermath, Gemma and her hanger-on sidekicks (Jen Van Epps, Brian Jordan Alvarez) are put under suspicion of treason, and quickly made into M3GAN’s fleshy subordinates. The finer details of how the killer doll survived the first movie’s climax are mostly hand-waved away, but rest assured she controls the smart house Gemma and Cady livs in and is calling all the shots before Gemma inevitably agrees to build M3GAN a new body so M3GAN can fisticuff with AMELIA. Auntie also puts on some new child locks, coding M3GAN with the command to not kill anybody (again like T2), but don’t worry. M3GAN does plenty of slaying even if without the body count.
The appeal of M3GAN 2.0 time and again comes down to the bemused guffaws this killer doll elicits every time she is on the screen. There is just something eerily honest about a smartphone that has the ability, and mouth, to judge you for your life choices. Johnstone and producer Jason Blum also obviously decided to lean into that quality while, perhaps wisely, not attempting to truly replicate the first M3GAN’s TikTok virality. There is a dance sequence, but it is so flatly shot and intercut with corporate espionage that I wouldn’t suspect anyone thinks this will be the next social media craze.
What’s intriguing though is how much the world has changed in the three scant years since this bot pirouetted her way into our hearts. While AI has long been the topic of water cooler pontification in Silicon Valley, the rest of the world didn’t really start thinking about the technology’s imminent life-changing applications until November 2022 when ChatGPT launched. Remarkably that was only 10 months or so after the first M3GAN. Suddenly the abstraction of this character’s menacing sentience took on a newfound urgency. Hence in the first movie she was a metaphor for technology writ-large being placed in a child’s palm. In the sequel, she is very much the face of both our destruction and salvation in the AI wars to come.
In theory the sequel should b e more timely, not to mention terrifying. Yet while more directly paying lip service to the potential dangers of AI, M3GAN 2.0’s pivot away from horror and social commentary is all the more curious. Rather than embrace the fatalism this unlikely franchise represents, M3GAN 2.0 essentially becomes a modern tech bro’s best case solution for “acclerationism.” Yeah, AI might try to wipe us out one day (i.e. AMELIA), but we can make an app for that, and it just so happens to rock the hell out of a pixie cut (M3GAN).
It’s a strange pivot that leads to a narrative that is much more ambitious yet also somewhat muddled with its twists on twists, and double-crosses on double-crosses. The switchbacks even multiply until the movie almost touches on a brilliantly subversive idea where Auntie Gemma and M3GAN reach a bizarre and curious place of detente. M3GAN 2.0’s script lacks the courage of its conviction to walk all the way through that door, but it gives Williams one exceptionally fun scene to play.
And fun is ultimately M3GAN 2.0’s prime directive. It’s a bit cluttered, overstuffed, and totally absent of its horror roots. But it is almost always fun and ready to win an easy laugh, especially when M3GAN and AMELIA cross paths and live up to the tagline of “This Bitch vs. That Bitch.” The rivalry has all the tension of a drag race, but it also has a similar amount of gaudy style and determination to win a grin. That shameless need to please also makes it ironically the most retro of the summer movies we’ve had so far this year.
M3GAN 2.0 opens on Friday, June 27.
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