There’s something eternally horrifying; and let’s be honest, deeply hilarious; about a tiny, cherub-cheeked doll or glossy-eyed robot going full Skynet on humanity. Maybe it’s the contrast: the innocence of playtime curdling into a bloodbath. Chucky’s been slashing and sassing for decades. Annabelle gave antique stores a permanent creep factor. And the T-1000 taught us that your friendly neighborhood police officer might just be liquid metal with commitment issues. It’s a legacy of homicidal hardware that M3GAN, that cheeky little TikTok-ready death machine, joined in 2022 with murder in her hard drive and pop songs in her heart.
M3GAN was a surprise hit, a low-budget Blumhouse gambit that morphed into a cultural moment; equal parts horror, camp, and viral marketing brilliance. With her long blonde locks, passive-aggressive tone, and one-woman dance recital, M3GAN wasn’t just a robot nanny; she was Regina George (Mean Girls)with a microchip. And audiences ate it up. $16 million budget, nearly $200 million box office, and more Funko Pops than you could threaten your child with.
So of course, Hollywood did what Hollywood does best: upgraded the software, doubled the runtime, and deleted the subtlety. Enter M3GAN 2.0, the cinematic equivalent of your iPhone suggesting an update that breaks everything and takes three hours to install.
The sequel reunites the original cast and crew; director Gerard Johnstone, writer Akeela Cooper, and producer James Wan; for what should have been a tighter, smarter, even bloodier encore. Instead, we get a mess of code, a tangle of exposition, and the cinematic equivalent of a corrupted file similar to the last two Mission: Impossible films.
This time around, Gemma (Allison Williams, gamely trying to hold it all together with cheekbones and STEM guilt) has sworn off robot babysitting and is now trying to unplug the world. Her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), no longer a grieving child but now a snarky pre-teen with eyeliner and opinions, misses her synthetic sister and is definitely going through her “I want to be a roboticist but also maybe set something on fire” phase. Gemma has a new boyfriend; played by Aristotle Athari from SNL, whose comic talents are tragically underused and mostly relegated to awkward tech exposition; and together they’ve apparently attracted the FBI’s attention.
Why the FBI? Because nothing says “realistic government priorities” like a department of suits deciding, “Hey, let’s build our own M3GAN, but let’s give her a more militarized name, like AMELIA.” (That’s “Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android,” for those keeping score at home. Someone definitely forced that acronym to work after a three-martini lunch.)
AMELIA, played by Ivanna Sakhno, is a slicker, meaner model; part femme fatale, part Black Mirror fan fiction. In her opening scene, she goes full Terminator, as the film shifts suddenly into a parody of a Michael Bay sequence, complete with explosions, slow-motion struts, and an oddly placed lens flare. It’s as if M3GAN 2.0 woke up and thought it was auditioning for Fast & Furious: Cyber Kindergarten.
This plot point, while potentially thrilling, is buried under layers of exposition that feel less like storytelling and more like tech bros explaining blockchain at a party you can’t leave. Realizing they’re in over their heads, Gemma, Cady, and their two hacker-friends-you-won’t-remember decide to do the unthinkable: bring back M3GAN. This should be the movie’s big moment; the “we need the old monster to fight the new monster” beat. Think Alien vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason, or your exes discovering each other on Instagram.
As far as M3GAN goes, she’s also… nice now? Sort of. The film leans hard into the Terminator 2 dynamic; bad robot becomes good robot, helps teach humans the meaning of love, etc. There’s even a borderline shot-for-shot homage to a T2 chase scene, minus Arnold’s charisma or James Cameron’s knack for pacing.
By the third act, the movie devolves into a bizarre hybrid of Spy Kids and Ex Machina, with M3GAN and AMELIA engaging in a battle that feels like watching two Amazon Alexas slap-fighting in slow motion. There’s a dance number, of course, but it lands like a rebooted meme; forced, self-aware, and 30 seconds too long.
The real kicker? M3GAN doesn’t show up until 45 minutes in. For a film called M3GAN, that’s borderline cinematic gaslighting. When she does finally arrive; rebooted, sassier, still dressed like a haunted Gap Kids mannequin; there’s a brief moment where the film sparks to life. Her one-liners about vaginal maintenance, China, and trauma bonding hit the right balance of discomfort and hilarity. But it’s fleeting. You can only wallpaper over so much clunky dialogue and narrative bloat with sardonic eye rolls and synchronized hip thrusts.
The sequel tries hard, too hard, to be everything. There’s tech-noir thriller. There’s government conspiracy. There’s surrogate motherhood. There’s puberty. There’s Terminator fanfic. There’s Mission: Impossible knockoffs, complete with a scene so clearly ripped from Tom Cruise’s playbook that I half expected M3GAN to start running in slow motion while a Hans Zimmer score swelled.
Even Allison Williams, ever the MVP of elevated horror and awkward family dinners, can’t salvage the overstuffed plot. She gets more to do physically; some mild action, some hardware-wielding; but her character is now buried under so much “tech mumbo jumbo” that she may as well be a TED Talk with a devastating smile.
The film’s ultimate crime, though? It forgets to be fun. The original M3GAN danced its way into meme culture because it knew what it was: absurd, creepy, and unreasonably delightful. M3GAN 2.0 feels like the kid in the classroom who’s trying way too hard to be cool. The jokes don’t land, the scares feel engineered, and even the musical number (yes, there is another one) feels like an AI-generated parody of itself.
By the time the climactic fight between M3GAN and AMELIA arrives; with choreography best described as low-battery Cirque du Soleil; you’re just grateful it’s almost over.
Of course, the door is left wide open for sequels. A whole fleet of M3GANs could still rise. And honestly, I hope they do. The character can work when treated with restraint, with wit, and maybe with a bit more lo-fi charm and a bit less franchise bloat. Horror-comedy is delicate alchemy. You can’t always scale it up without short-circuiting the whole thing. M3GAN 2.0 isn’t a total system failure; but it’s definitely running on buggy code. This is best viewed at home. With snacks. And your own kill switch nearby.
WRITTEN BY: BRYAN KLUGER
BRYAN KLUGER, A SEASONED VOICE IN THE REALM OF ENTERTAINMENT CRITICISM, HAS CONTRIBUTED TO A WIDE ARRAY OF PUBLICATIONS INCLUDING ARTS+CULTURE MAGAZINE, HIGH DEF DIGEST, BOOMSTICK COMICS, AND HOUSING WIRE MAGAZINE, AMONG OTHERS.
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