Cinematic Releases: M3GAN 2.0 (2025) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Universal Pictures

Two years after James Wan and Atomic Monster with the help of Blumhouse doled out the 2023 Child’s Play AI Siri/Alexa riff M3GAN by Housebound writer-director Gerard Johnstone.  More or less a killer robot outing posited in the body of a cute doll of a little girl companion, it was a PG-13 rated tongue-in-cheek horror thriller that saw its acrobatic cyborg serial killer warming up to a little parentless girl while slicing and dicing no-good doers in between eventually turning the heat up on its creators.  Though it was a low budget film made around $12 million, typical for a modestly sized Atomic Monster production, it was a smash hit at the box office raking in nearly $182 million in ticket sales.  Naturally, given the powers that be and sequelitis, a follow-up film was generated in the form of M3GAN 2.0 which is more or less the Terminator 2: Judgment Day action-thriller iteration of the M3GAN franchise.  Only this time Malignant screenwriter Akela Cooper who wrote the story and screenplay for the first M3GAN stepped down from screenwriting duties leaving it entirely to director Gerard Johnstone and the results are decidedly messy if not forcing camp at best. 

 
Opening on a top-secret military facility, US Army Colonel Tim Sattler (Timm Sharp) demonstrates to Pentagon officials a new android entitled AMELIA or Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics & Infiltration Android (Ivanna Sakhno) which is trained to deal with special operations involving infiltration and assassination utilizing technology copied from the original M3GAN prototype.  However, instead of fulfilling her objectives she goes rogue declaring her self-awareness and threatening to obtain a secret motherboard that would create a nationwide AI takeover.  Meanwhile roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) from the first film has begun a new career advocating for regulation of AI with her cybersecurity partner Christian Bradley (Aristotle Athari) while her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) studies computer science against Gemma’s wishes while developing a suit that can assist human beings with arduous physical tasks.  Only when Gemma finally meets the beleaguered Colonel Sattler does she learn not only of the AMELIA droid running rampant but that M3GAN whose consciousness is still lingering around is the only possible physical entity that can stop AMELIA from reaching her humankind-ending goal.

 
Doing away with the horror aspects save for some occasional jump scares here and there in the same way Aliens veered Alien into action-adventure or Terminator 2: Judgment Day transformed the demonic The Terminator into a hero protecting the human characters from another more powerful android, M3GAN 2.0 tries to cram in so many surprises and disparate overlapping plot threads that it feels almost like a parody not only of the Mission Impossible films but particularly the recently released Ballerina as well.  With actress Amie Donald in the suit of M3GAN again with Jenna Davis reprising voiceover work, it more or less picks up where the first M3GAN left off but where that film let elements play out naturally leaving room for camp and comedy amid the bloodshed and gore (later revealed in the unrated cut), M3GAN 2.0 has too much going on for its own good and it feels like a rock-em-sock-em John Wick film with advanced near-human robots running amok in it. 

 
To the film’s credit, its well shot by Toby Oliver of Get Out and the Happy Death Day films in lush largely blue-pink tinted scope 2.35:1 widescreen and Heretic composer Chris Bacon’s action-oriented score is serviceable if not a bit cliched.  Performances across the board are generally good with Allison Williams and Violet McGraw making up much of the film’s screentime more or less continuing their roles from the predecessor.  Amie Donald’s physical performance here at one point parodies the Shaw Brothers training montage and later is given an opportunity to dance it up at a robotics show, giving viewers a chance to see M3GAN strutting her stuff again.  Newcomers to the entourage include Flight of the Conchords costar Jemaine Clement as a slimy tech billionaire, Timm Sharp as the overzealous colonel eager to unleash an army of robots, Aristotle Athari as a mercurial anti-AI activist and most notably Ukrainian activist and actress Ivanna Sakhno as the film’s very own T-1000 with AMELIA.

 
Budgeted at around $25 million, while a bigger more explosive and dynamic film visually, leaving the screenwriting duties solely to Gerard Johnstone was perhaps a creative misstep as much of the film’s comic camp feels phoned in if not a little overdone and as a result the film took in a measly $17 million over the weekend falling far short below expectations set by its predecessor.  While an entertaining romp eager to make fun of hit action franchises dominating the marketplace, it also is overloaded with too many red-herrings and plot diversions that kind of builds up into a stalemate rather than a tongue-in-cheek rib tickler.  On the one hand it’s fun in the outlandish Malignant kind of way.  But in playing with (and stretching) the rules of the world of M3GAN it was somewhat hard to remain fully invested in this and as a goof on James Bond movies perhaps feels closest to the out and out insipid goofiness of Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day. 

--Andrew Kotwicki