The “M3gan” franchise — look, we all know there’s going to be a “3.0” — is the opposite of serious. In 2022, the first film played on the time-tested horror trope of the killer doll, adding an artificial intelligence twist. It became an instant camp classic, owing largely to clips from the trailer that were meme-ified all over the internet, especially its queer corners. Critics even loved it, probably because it clearly knew what kind of flamboyant nonsense it was aiming for and leaned all the way in.
“M3gan 2.0” is no more serious than the original, but occasionally feels like it’s trying to be. When we last saw Gemma (Allison Williams, still sincere and excellent) and her tween niece Cady (Violet McGraw), they were picking up the pieces of their lives after M3gan, the A.I.-powered android that Gemma programmed to protect Cady, followed her prime directive so single-mindedly that she wreaked total havoc on their lives. Now, two years later, Gemma has become an author and an advocate for legislation and safeguards in A.I. development, and she carefully monitors Cady’s tech usage.
This is an interesting turn of events for a movie like this, because it seems to take Gemma’s concerns seriously, laying out convincing arguments for not leaving all the A.I. development to profit-obsessed tech bros. Watching “M3gan 2.0,” I got the sense someone had done their homework, thinking about the ways that rhetoric about enhancing mankind’s future and creating a better world can, and do, function as a smoke screen for less altruistic ends. Once in a while, I caught myself thinking this movie was more grounded in the reality of A.I. in our world than films like the “Mission: Impossible” series.
But it’s still a killer doll movie. With her labmates (Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps), Gemma is still developing products designed to help humans live in this brave new world, like a kind of exoskeleton that increases human stamina and strength. She’s also struck up an ambiguously warm relationship with the tech ethicist Christian (Aristotle Athari). But when a mysterious weapon named Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno) turns up abroad, and a billionaire (Jemaine Clement) starts sniffing around Gemma’s lab, it’s clear things are going go to sideways.
In returning to M3gan’s world, the screenwriter and director Gerard Johnstone repeats some of the same formula, most notably the reappearance of the deranged A.I. doll (once again performed by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis). It’s still camp galore, with lines designed to be meme-ified again, and a lot of elaborate silliness. There’s acrobatic fighting; there’s a dance scene; there’s a hilarious nod to an A.I. product that notoriously flopped in the real world.
And there’s probably, in truth, too much of all of that. “M3gan 2.0” is two hours long, and feels like it’s reached its climax around the 80-minute mark — a pacing issue, due mostly to an overstuffed plot. Maximalism has its place, but it wears out its welcome here.
If you find yourself zoning out in the third act, here’s something to consider: How should we think about Hollywood’s obsession with A.I. as a destructive force? On the one hand, the entertainment business is careening toward the existential brink in part because A.I., with its speed and lack of demands for things like fair working hours and health insurance, threatens to replace vast swaths of the humans who work in the industry. On the other hand, studios keep making these movies. Anxiety? Projection? Guilty conscience? Obliviousness?
I don’t know the answer. I do know that the movies have been warning us for many decades — almost since the beginning of cinema, in fact — that artificial intelligence should be approached with extreme caution, lest we be hunted down by Terminators or find ourselves plugged into a matrix. Somehow none of that has had much of an effect on our real-world development of A.I., nor on its deployment in the present now that tech is catching up to the movies. Good news for M3gan, perhaps, but not so much for Gemma and Cady.
M3gan 2.0
Rated PG-13 for lots of cartoonish but brutal violence and some bad language. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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