More than half a century ago, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was the visionary cinematic manifesto of artificial intelligence, with HAL 9000 as the mopy-voiced avatar of the computer technology of the future. What wasn’t so clear at the time is that “2001” would anticipate the theme of 100 artificial-intelligence thrillers to come (most of them haven’t been made yet, but just you wait). The theme being: AI is here, and it wants to kill you.
“M3GAN 2.0” inflates that theme into a heavy-duty, poker-faced preposterous, but mostly more straight-up than not “cautionary” sci-fi action thriller. The borderline-camp quality of “M3GAN” isn’t completely gone, since the new film is structured as a duel between two androids who are photogenic enough to be fashion models. But this one plays it with less overt cheekiness.
The title killer of “M3GAN” has been resurrected, but she’s now an unironic heroine who is also more of a chatterbox than ever. And there’s a new fembot terminator, named AMELIA (it stands for autonomous military engagement logistics and infiltration android — but why isn’t there a 3 in her name, dammit?), who is introduced, in the opening sequence, as a weapons-grade U.S. military experiment gone rogue. AMELIA was sprung out of M3GAN’s coding, so the two have a lot in common. But M3GAN, reconstituted after she was destroyed, still has vestiges of a sense of humor. AMELIA is all strictly-business paramilitary poutiness.
If you leave aside the tangled web of comic-book movies, sequels — the old-fashioned kind, the kind that producers didn’t necessarily plan to make — still tend to fall into one of two categories. There’s the sequel that’s out to duplicate the appeal of the original film. And then there’s the kind that wants to seriously level up, in the spirit of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” The very title of “M3GAN 2.0” tells you it’s of the latter variety. The irony being that “M3GAN,” a sleeper hit in the early months of 2024, was just a cheeseball throwaway that landed.
“M3GAN 2.0” isn’t as much fun as the first film. Gerard Johnstone, who returns as director (now writing the screenplay as well), certainly knows what he’s doing, but he allows much of what audiences dug about the original movie to fall by the wayside — its whole clever/stupido slasher kitsch insanity. Gone is the hook of the title character as a demon-doll android who becomes an 8-year-old’s surrogate assassin. M3GAN, in the first film, was a satirical extension of the devices we use to keep our kids from being bored, but she turned into a dancing robot pixie who knew how to use a nail gun: a fusion of HAL, a missing Olsen sister and Chucky.
Where the first film was ahead of the curve, “M3GAN 2.0” has been made in the thick of the AI explosion and is all too aware of it. The new movie is bigger, longer, more “ambitious,” and programmed to be an Important Comment on AI. Allison Williams, with her jaunty rationality, is back as Gemma, M3GAN’s creator, and the character has undergone her penance. She’s been on a talk-show apology tour, she wrote a book entitled “Modern Moderation” (about the cautious ways we should employ tech toys for kids), and she joined a corporation called the Center for Safe Technology, all about limiting the use of AI.
But after all this guilty garment-tearing — too much of it, I would say — she learns that M3GAN’s body may have been destroyed, but the program that gave her life is still in play. AMELIA, who appears to have busted out of her programming to take on a malevolent life of her own, now poses a threat to world peace. So Gemma, held in a laboratory bunker by M3GAN (who so wants to come back to life!), agrees to reconstitute M3GAN to fight the more dangerous menace.
At first, Gemma implants M3GAN’s program in a sawed-off generic android that M3GAN derisively calls a Teletubby. But the M3GAN we know and love is soon back with an upgrade, looking more animatronically fetching than ever. She’s once again played by Amie Donald (face fused with FX) and by Jenna Davis, who supplies that voice of snarky spun sugar. And she’s still got a whiplash wit, though she now talks so much that she’s effectively as human as anyone onscreen.
M3GAN, with her glassy big eyes and synthetic skin, still looks only 60 percent real, but AMELIA, though more of a one-note kamikaze fatale, looks about 95 percent human. Attending a tech convention in a gold lamé dress, blonde hair spilling over her shoulders, she’s a glam weapon played by the Ukrainian-born Ivanna Sakhno, who resembles RuPaul crossed with Bibi Andersson. When Alton Appleton (Jermaine Clement), a doofus douche of a tech gazillionaire who lives on the cutting edge of brain-implant technology (he no longer needs a computer; he just…sees everything), lures her back to his playboy pad, we can see why, but he’s doomed.
Alton seems villainous enough, but there’s another, more sinister tech bro on hand, who’s at the controls of the film’s conspiracy. It has to do with an old household robot program from the ’80s, which has become treacherous simply by…sitting around in a vault. (Computers, it seems, are good at teaching themselves how to destroy.) There’s a token human story, all about how Gemme redeems herself and also, of course, about the fate of Cady (Violet McGraw), who was M3GAN’s bestie in the first film. She’s now 12, and still the one M3GAN is programmed to protect, yet she spends a lot of the time on the sidelines.
Does “M3GAN 2.0” commit some fatal movie heresy by taking the sinister title android of the first film and elevating her to likable heroine status? Sort of, but not really. She was only doing what she was programmed to do back then anyway. And when M3GAN infiltrates that tech convention disguised in the anime drag of an Asian android, her charisma is on full display. The limitation of “M3GAN 2.0” is that it’s a competent but cumbersome overelaboration of the M3GAN concept. There are a handful of the moments you want — like M3GAN literally dancing the robot onstage, or a climactic fight that turns on the worship of Steven Seagal, or M3GAN soothing Gemma by singing Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work.” But that may not be enough. “M3GAN 2.0” is amusing at moments, overblown at others. Here’s hoping that “M3GAN 3.0” is brasher, funkier, crazier.