“M3GAN 2.0” is another shiny display case for its violent antiheroine, an artificially intelligent doll with little regard for human life. In the new movie, there are two of them: Meet AMELIA, a lithesome blond who opens the film decimating a bunker somewhere near the border of Turkey and Iran. The robot babe’s name stands for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android, and one can imagine the real White House asking if we can actually build her.
This fledgling franchise has rewired itself from horror to action-comedy. Bigger and goofier than the 2022 hit, “M3GAN 2.0” is content to be this summer’s fidget spinner: an amusement soon forgotten. You can easily accuse returning director Gerard Johnstone (who’s taken over screenwriting duties too) of assembling it from other movies’ nuts and bolts. He’s not hiding his influences, including “The Terminator,” “Metropolis” and the head-spinning theatrics of “The Exorcist.” It’s a magpie movie that’s happy to give audiences the tinselly things they want — i.e., two robots clobbering the Wi-Fi out of each other. But Johnstone creates openings for his own shaggy sense of humor. I’m excited to keep tabs on the promising New Zealander.
The snippy robot begins the film with her body destroyed but her ego as big as ever. M3GAN, voiced by Jenna Davis and embodied by both an animatronic puppet and the young dancer Amie Donald, will be reconstructed and built back better — and taller, as the physically gifted Donald has herself aged from 12 to 15. As an interim step, M3GAN gets temporarily placed in a tiny teal bot with flipper hands named Moxie, who seems adorable unless you know that Moxie was a real AI emotional support doll launched in 2020 that was abruptly bricked last year, teaching kids a sad lesson in startup funding and, in essence, death. (You can find videos online of people saying goodbye to their comatose friend.)
Meanwhile, M3GAN’S creator Gemma (a droll Allison Williams) is out of prison and rebranding herself as an anti-technology crusader. “You wouldn’t give your child cocaine — why would you give them a smartphone?” she hectors, while her bland do-gooder boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari) enlists the United Nations to fight back against the creeping omnipotence of AI. Cady (Violet McGraw), Gemma’s 12-year-old orphaned niece, wants a career in computer science. Gemma prefers that she concentrate on soccer.
Smartly, these films don’t create a phony dichotomy between tender humans and cold machinery. Gemma’s interpersonal skills could use an update. She can’t connect to her young charge. Hilariously and hypocritically, she orders Cady around with zero respect for the child’s free will. When Cady insists that she’s not sleepy enough to go to bed, Gemma snaps, “Take a melatonin.”
What interests Johnstone here is how biological and synthetic beings blend together. Gemma and her colleagues Cole and Tess (Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epp) are designing a mechanized exoskeleton that would allow a human worker to toss around concrete blocks as breezily as a penny (although when it glitches, Cole can’t get out of the suit to use the bathroom). Their billionaire potential investor, Alton (Jemaine Clement, whose oily lecherousness may remind you of a recent government employee), has a neural chip in his temple that’s layered an invisible computer screen over his retinas. Blinking his eyes to take photographs, this repellent tech bro appears so ridiculous that you half-wonder if his innovation is fake, — the emperor’s new code. But when AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) uses his eyeballs against him, we enjoy Alton realizing how pitiful he looks.
The plot here is the same one we’re going to keep repeating until today’s technofeudalist geeks quit inventing things that the majority of people don’t want. (So, probably forever.) AMELIA wants access to the computer cloud that controls every facet of our existence, from the power grid to the financial markets. There’s a cool, if truncated, car chase in which AMELIA treats humans like roadblocks, flinging us into traffic by freezing scooters and releasing cash from sidewalk ATMs.
On a more intimate scale, Gemma and Cady’s new Bay Area rental is a smart house where everything is a potential poltergeist, from the ice dispenser to the vacuum. They thought M3GAN was dead; turns out, she’s the ghost in their machines. The movie isn’t scary in the slightest. But afterward, it’s terrifying to count how many things you own that aren’t truly under your control — and, scarier, how hard it’s getting to stop this home invasion. Does anyone really need their refrigerator authorized to order more eggs?
“M3GAN 2.0” is at heart a B-movie about a technological arms race fought by femmebots with literal swinging arms. It’s dopey by design. At least Johnstone punches up the premise. There’s not just one secret lair — there are three! — and each has its own playful reveal. Later, he finagles a physical comedy beat in which Gemma is delighted to realize she’s more like M3GAN than she thinks. I was never that moved by M3GAN’s girl-power-y argument that she has a soul (“I’m nobody’s plaything,” she growls.) And the scene in which she and Gemma bond starts off like a groaner but gets us howling when the doll goes too far and begins to sing another cringey pop song, a great gag recycled from the last movie.
Most of the other obvious yuks are flashy and hollow: Of course M3GAN will dance. Of course M3GAN will zip into a flying squirrel suit and go soaring over the trees. Of course a souped-up smart sports car will blare the theme music from “Knight Rider.” That gets a reflexive chuckle, but it mostly reminds us that today’s so-called genius inventors just wish their childhood toys were real.
But what intrigues me about Johnstone are the jokes that barely involve M3GAN at all. The most surprising laugh in the first movie came when a detective giggled as he described a little boy’s murder. Killer dolls, we get. Yet, this was the stock cop character seen in every genre flick acting fundamentally against his programming. Here, that humor has gone viral — it’s now in every scene — insisting that humanity itself is fundamentally strange and unpredictable.
The robot is the draw, but I’d watch “M3GAN 2.0” for the people. And stay for the end credits disclaimer: “This work may not be used to train AI.” Good luck with that.
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