PLOT: Two years after the events of M3GAN, a new AI robot, AMELIA, is wreaking havoc and has Gemma (Allison Williams) on her hit list. However, a newly repentant M3GAN is still out there and eager to help—if Gemma gives her a new body.
REVIEW: M3GAN 2.0 is fairly daring for a sequel to a horror flick in that it does something rare for a follow-up—it switches genres. Granted, the first film wasn’t particularly scary, but it was still technically a horror movie, albeit with liberal doses of humour. M3GAN 2.0, however, isn’t trying to be horror at all. It’s a straightforward sci-fi action-adventure, with writer/director Gerard Johnstone getting to make this his riff on Terminator 2: Judgement Day, albeit with a fraction of the budget. While this aspect might turn off territorial horror fans, the movie is actually a ton of fun, with some surprisingly creative action as it switches M3GAN from being an antagonist to a hero.
What helps is that Johnstone never intends for us to take the premise seriously, as if he realized no one was especially frightened by M3GAN in the first film. They rooted for her against the humans, so he’s doubled down and made her a straight-up good guy. But how? Well, it turns out that M3GAN’s consciousness survived the first film, and she feels bad that her actions upset Violet McGraw’s Cady, who she’s still programmed to protect. When AMELIA comes along and threatens Gemma, it’s the fact that Cady is in the crossfire that puts her into an alliance with Gemma and her surviving colleagues from the first film—Jen Van Epps’s Tess, and English Teacher star Brian Jordan Alvarez, who has a beefed-up role this time.
M3GAN 2.0 seems to have been working with a larger budget than usual for Blumhouse, with Johnstone staging some wild battles featuring M3GAN—once again played by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis—using a combination of animatronics, costumes, mo-cap, CGI, and more. M3GAN doesn’t look real, but then again, she doesn’t have to. One area that might have saved a bit in terms of the budget is that AMELIA is played by actress Ivanna Sakhno and is supposed to look human. But there are also drones and plenty of humans for both robots to face off with in some well-shot and choreographed action scenes. Johnstone does a good job staging the combat sequences, with lots of martial arts and even a few scenes where some of the humans get to show off some impressive moves. Surprisingly, the film is a kind of love letter to martial arts, with one of the movie’s funniest jokes revolving around Cady’s newfound love of aikido and Steven Seagal movies.
If M3GAN 2.0 has a failing, it’s that the humour’s camp quotient is dialled way up, and the script lacks the satiric edge of the original. Writer Akela Cooper (who wrote the great Malignant) only has a “story by” credit, as Johnstone tackled the writing solo this time. The humour is laid on a little too thick at times, with Alvarez’s comic relief unnecessary in a movie that’s already blatantly comic, while Jermaine Clement, in an extended cameo as an Elon Musk-type figure, delivers too broad a performance for a movie like this. However, Allison Williams, who came off as dull in the first film, has a juicier role this time—especially in the film’s second half.
It seems that with M3GAN 2.0, Johnstone did something similar to what Parker Finn did with Smile 2—he used what could have been a routine assignment and turned it into a showcase for his talents beyond genre. While this might infuriate horror audiences expecting a more meat-and-potatoes sequel, no one can deny the film is a lot of fun—even if it’s a shade too long at two hours. I’m eager to see where Johnstone goes next, even if after M3GAN 2.0, I’m not sure there’s anywhere else for this franchise to go. This puts a bow on it nicely.
