The killer doll from 2023’s M3GAN is resurrected to fight a weaponized AI robot gone rogue in M3GAN 2.0, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. The Ex Machina-meets-Child’s Play sci-fi-horror trappings from the original film have been jettisoned for the full Terminator 2: Judgment Day treatment, as the emotionless antagonist from the first film now becomes stoic action hero and, why not, mankind’s only savior. It’s a bold choice, Blumhouse—let’s see if it pays off.
Two years after the events of M3GAN, the United States government has apparently obtained the technology created—and, or so she thought, destroyed—by AI robotics wiz Gemma (Alison Williams). It’s now in the control of an FBI agent played by Timm Sharp, who—for some reason—loans it out to Saudi Arabia to conduct a secret mission on the border between Iran and Turkey.
Predictably, the mission goes bad, and AMELIA (played by Ivanna Sakhno with the same kind of robotic flair delivered by Robert Patrick and Kristanna Loken in the Terminator films) goes rogue and kills her intended rescue target. Then she hops a plane back to the States to continue her killing spree. Why she is doing this is clarified in great detail during lengthy exposition dumps over the course of the movie, which make less and less sense the longer M3GAN 2.0 goes on.
One of AMELIA’s targets, apparently, is Gemma, who has been struggling to build a working AI exoskeleton with colleagues Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps). But once Gemma’s niece Cady (Violet McGraw)—who the original killer robot was programmed to protect—becomes threatened, M3GAN reveals herself to be alive in the ether, a ghost in the machine. Well, duh. Surely, we know that despite destroying the physical robot in the earlier film, the AI being that had access to the cloud and could back itself up was not gone for good.
In the first of the film’s futile attempts to explain its story, it’s revealed that AMELIA is killing everyone responsible for her development, for some reason, and making her way back to an “original” sentient AI being, which was mistakenly created by a photocopier company in the 1980s. “It’s her family,” M3GAN (voiced by Jenna Davis) says.
Of course, M3GAN is the only one that can stop AMELIA. And while they could put her AI in anything—perhaps one of those military-grade robots wityh the rocket-powered hands that show up at the end of the film—they recreate the AI doll from the original film. Just a little taller, so Amie Donald can come back to play her.
M3GAN 2.0 benefits from the mere presence of the title character, who is a lot more talkative and cattier this time around and performed with the same panache by Davis and Donald. M3GAN’s brief dance moves became a viral hit in the first film, and an extended sequence in which she does the robot as a retro-futuristic go-go dancer at an AI conference is a highlight here.
But M3GAN isn’t in enough of this movie to justify everything else that occurs throughout its two-plus hour runtime, and while this story should be simple enough to write itself—we know what’s up with characters played by Jemaine Clement and Aristotle Athari from their first scenes—returning writer-director Gerard Johnstone gets himself tangled up in knots trying to tell it. By the end, it turns into complete nonsense; attempts to rationalize what happens will result in a headache.
Maybe that’s what the frequent references to Steven Seagal movies—likely to draw confusion among most members of the intended audience—are trying to get across: turn your brain off to have some fun here. But even Hard to Kill, Above the Law, and Executive Decision had more internal logic than this one, which is operating more at the level of On Deadly Ground.
What M3GAN 2.0 does have going for it is its stylized neon-lit style and slick direction from Johnstone, who almost—but not quite—keeps things moving fast enough for us not to question the story. Some audiences will dismiss this one outright for the genre switch-up from horror to action, while those who give it a chance will find that it doesn’t even work on its new terms. In its battle of rogue AIs, M3GAN 2.0 proves you can’t just reboot a killer app and expect it to work.
