by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Ivanna Sakhno, Aristotle Athari, Jemaine Clement
Intro:
… overstuffed with undeveloped ideas, almost completely lacking in scares and most bafflingly underutilises its star!
Most horror franchises eventually drop the scares in favour of camp comedy and goofy shenanigans. It happened in A Nightmare on Elm Street’s sixth entry, Freddy’s Dead. With Friday the 13th, it was also part six, Jason Lives. A more thematically apt comparison might be Chucky, the classic Brad Dourif-voiced killer doll, who fully embraced stylish, chuckle-worthy nonsense with Bride of Chucky, the fourth chapter of the popular Child’s Play saga. The point is, it usually happens deep into the run of films. M3GAN 2.0 is a bit of an outlier, because it’s gone full underpants-on-head mode in the second entry in the series! And the result is… eh. It’s okay.
M3GAN 2.0 continues the story of young Cady (Violet McGraw), who lives with her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), trying to cobble together their lives after surviving the violent protective instincts of killer robot, M3GAN (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis) two years earlier. Gemma has now become an advocate for the regulation of artificial intelligence and is trying to flog new tech that integrates with humanity rather than replaces it. However, when AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), a brand new evil AI enters the scene with a very convoluted plan to end the world, Cady and Gemma might just need to reboot M3GAN to save the planet.
The idea of a redemption arc for the killer bot is an intriguing one, but it feels way too early in the franchise to pull that trigger. It also requires putting the titular murder-appliance in the background and spending more time building up the new menace, AMELIA (stands for “Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android” FYI). While Ivanna Sakhno does incredibly strong work portraying a more advanced, murderous android, one does begin to wonder whose film this actually is. Add to that a slew of subplots involving Jemaine Clement as a sleazy tech bro, Brian Jordan Alvarez as goofy comic relief and Aristotle Athari as an enigmatic anti-AI crusader and it soon becomes clear that this is a sequel that has trouble focusing. Coming in at a chubby 120 minutes (twenty minutes longer than the original), the film seeks to do two dozen different things and only partially succeeds at a couple.
Violet McGraw and Allison Williams both do solid, likeable work (although Williams is tasked to deliver howlingly bad dialogue at times) and when the film remembers to include M3GAN the team up of Amie Donald/Jenna Davis works beautifully. However, in a film whose tone is so frothy, camp and glib, it’s hard to get particularly invested in anything that happens. It’s trashily entertaining in fits and starts, and there are a couple of zingers well delivered by Jenna Davis, but ultimately M3GAN 2.0 is overstuffed with undeveloped ideas, almost completely lacking in scares and most bafflingly underutilises its star! It’s not terminal, mind you, but if M3GAN 3.0 ever gets greenlit, some debugging will definitely be required.
