When Blumhouse and Atomic Monster joined forces two years ago to bring M3GAN to life, no one could have imagined that a new horror icon was about to be born. Not that we hadn't already had killer dolls (Chucky remains unsurpassed, though), but director Gerard Johnstone and screenwriter Akela Cooper had touched the right chords to talk about young people's dependence on technology. A real problem that many parents and teachers face daily, but turned into horror atmospheres.
Given the excellent success of the 2023 film, it was inevitable that the two production companies, which had since merged, would soon put a sequel in development, to which the same artistic and technical team returned to work. But we could never have imagined that M3GAN 2.0 would change its skin so drastically, transforming into an action comedy with sci-fi spy story suggestions!
After the bad experience with the M3GAN doll prototype, Gemma is on the front lines to promote the regulation and control of new robotic technologies and artificial intelligence, while her niece Cady, now a teenager, is following the path her aunt had taken, demonstrating great skill in robotic engineering. When Gemma and Cady end up at the center of an FBI raid, they realize they have become the target of an anthropomorphic robotic weapon that was secretly developed from the software used to design M3GAN and initially used by the U.S. military for delicate military missions. Now that weapon, called AMELIA, has developed its own consciousness and is seeking out everyone who knows how to stop it to eliminate them. Gemma is then forced to create a new M3GAN to send her to confront AMELIA.
If we were to think like a producer, when considering working on the sequel of a successful film that has captured the interest of a very specific type of audience (in this case, horror film fans), the first rule that sequel should follow would be to tell a different story while remaining as faithful as possible to the suggestions of the previous success. With M3GAN 2.0, however, they went in the inexplicably opposite direction, not only subverting the concept and atmospheres but drastically changing the reference genre and, therefore, the potential audience. It wasn't a success like The Evil Dead II or Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, where the same concept was added with irony, but a radical subversion that could either win over new audiences or backfire like a boomerang.
M3GAN 2.0 begins as a spy-action film, with a beautiful girl—Ivanna Sakhno—who alone in Iran infiltrates a terrorist den, kills them all, finds her target, and instead of proceeding with the extraction, according to Pentagon orders, kills him too. We quickly discover that she is a robot and from here we connect to the protagonists of the previous film, re-introduced with a comedic air. Gemma (Allison Williams) is finally engaged (to a millionaire activist) and fights against what she created; Cady (Violet McGraw) is a kind of computer genius and a fan of Steven Seagal, so she practices aikido and is more of a pain in the ass than in the previous film because in the meantime she has become an adolescent “brat.” To them, we add Gemma's friends and collaborators, Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez), who continue to work in the field of robotics but with very noble goals (like an exoskeleton that should help people with disabilities). Of the two, Cole is clearly a comic character, but of the type that physical gags are also entrusted to him.
As in the most unlikely of Adam Sandler comedies, this quartet of characters is tasked with stopping the new robotic threat, which seems to have come straight out of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (remember the Terminatrix played by Kristianna Loken?). After about forty minutes of spy-comedy in which there is also room for a citation to the TV series Knight Rider, when they realize that two women in their forties with no type of training, a child, and an overweight guy on the verge of mental retardation are not able to face a killer robot, M3GAN comes back into play.
For the first twenty minutes, however, the robot that in the original still has the voice of Jenna Davis, is only a voice, trapped in a toy like Ashley Too from Black Mirror 5. The human-like M3GAN (obviously enhanced) enters the scene after more than an hour of the film, sports a new hi-tech look that is very K-Pop, and plays the role of the good robot. Sure, there is still a bit of jerkiness in her way of doing things, but this time the ex-killer doll TikTok diva has switched sides in an obvious attempt to emulate the role reversal of Terminator 2. And the imagery of James Cameron is recalled on several occasions, with citations also from Aliens and Alita: Battle Angel (which Cameron produced, though).
Among absurd action in the style of Charlie's Angels, PG-13 violence always hidden from the camera's eye, and telegraphed plot twists that couldn't be more telegraphed, M3GAN 2.0 drags on for nearly two hours, proving to be a completely out-of-focus film. Because okay, the reckless desire to change the cards on the table by denying the natural audience what they seek, but the aggravating circumstance is that this new skin for M3GAN is also a substantial qualitative downgrade in the broadest sense.
What remains after watching M3GAN 2.0, besides the now-iconic character, is a reflection on the need to regulate artificial intelligence with criteria… even that used by film and television entertainment studios to understand in which direction to proceed with their projects.
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