By Jake Wilson
M3GAN 2.0
★★★
M, 119 minutes
Conspiracy theorists might make something of the fact that M3GAN, a film about a sinister artificially intelligent talking doll, had its US premiere in December 2022, a week or so after ChatGPT was unleashed on the public.
Gemma (Allison Williams) and M3GAN in M3GAN 2.0Credit:
Since then, AI fatigue has set in to the point where the prudent choice for filmmakers would be to avoid the subject altogether, especially as M3GAN’s real-life equivalents don’t threaten to take over the world so much as drown us in a sea of cliches.
But a hit is a hit, and so Gerard Johnstone, the talented New Zealand director of the original, is back for another round with the clumsily titled M3GAN 2.0, this time working from his own script, even if this isn’t the version of Hollywood success he might have mapped out for himself in his dreams.
Voiced by YouTube personality Jenna Davis and embodied by the young dancer Amie Donald in an animatronic mask, M3GAN started out as a caramel-haired waif about the same size as her orphaned eight-year-old owner Cady (Violet McGraw), but with considerably more adult poise.
Since her body was destroyed at the end of the first film, for a while she’s reduced to a ghost in the machine, haunting Cady’s aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), the tightly-wound roboticist who came up with the idea for a high-tech doll in the first place.
Before long M3GAN is back on the earthly plane in a new form – but the changes aren’t just physical. In the first film, she was a classic case of good intentions gone wrong, programmed to keep Cady safe at all costs, and racking up a significant kill count in the process.
Somewhere along the line, though, Johnstone or his overseers have decided that a cool-eyed, stylish, outwardly demure killing machine prone to quips such as “Hang onto your vaginas” is simply too fabulous to be treated as a simple villain.
Where the first M3GAN was a campy horror movie, this one is more of a campy techno-thriller, with a dash of sub-Spielbergian fantasies of the 1980s such as Short Circuit (Johnstone, born in 1976, knows his vintage pop culture: the climax should gratify fans of B-grade 1990s action films).
Much as Terminator 2 made Arnold Schwarzenegger the good guy facing off against a liquid metal antagonist, here there’s a new killer robot on the scene, AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) – a military asset gone rogue, created using the same technology that brought M3GAN to life, but with bigger goals than being a blend of bodyguard and nanny.
M3GAN 2.0 is an oddity: overlong, not entirely suited to either children or adults, and probably too much of a departure from the original to satisfy whatever dedicated cult exists.
There aren’t even as many classic M3GAN moments as might be anticipated, despite one outlandish scene all too visibly designed for the Internet. But unlike much of what’s currently in multiplexes, it does feel like a film made by a human being, willing to go off-script as no AI ever would.
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