‘M3GAN 2.0’ is more of an expansion pack than an upgrade

The problem with M3GAN 2.0, the sequel to 2022’s surprise hit/meme-generator about a killer robot determined to protect her young charge, is that its title denotes something that the film’s audience wants, but that the film’s characters really, really don’t.

“M3GAN 2.0,” after all, promises the audience that M3GAN, the artificial companion originally created by workaholic roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) for her newly orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw), is gonna get rebuilt. (Gemma pulled M3GAN’s plug at the end of the original film after the robot went on a distinctly PG-13 killing spree.)

Now, we the audience recall only too well that M3GAN, again embodied here by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis, was a hoot and a half. She quipped, sang some Sia, danced to some Skatt Brothers, killed folk who mostly deserved it, and always told the truth with the cool dispassion of Siri on lithium.

We, in turn, loved M3GAN. We did her dance on TikTok, we dressed up like her for Halloween, we commissioned our drag queens to pay her musical homage.

So this summer, as we settle our butts into theater seats for a film called M3GAN 2.0, we all know what it is we want to see: M3GAN’s incipient return, and the commensurate booty-shaking and butt-kicking that will inevitably ensue.

But the thing is, the sequel’s characters recall the events of the first film, and have a very different take on them. To Gemma, Cady and the other members of the returning cast, the idea of rebuilding M3GAN is a very bad, no good, downright stupid idea.

You see the problem. We know M3GAN’s gonna get rebuilt. The film’s characters – particularly Gemma – don’t wanna rebuild her.

Thus, the first half-hour of the film is taken up by Gemma cycling through variations of “What, are you crazy?” “Rebuild M3GAN? That’s a terrible idea!” “I’m not rebuilding M3GAN! Don’t you remember what happened the last time?” and “No. No way. Not happening.”

Here’s the thing though, reader: Eventually? It’s happening.

But before that gets to be happening, the script does a lot of very sweaty, superfluous work to narratively justify rebuilding M3GAN. (Not to justify it to us, of course – we’ve been onboard from the jump; since the lights in the theater first went down, we’ve all practically been standing by the laboratory table waiting to hand Gemma the dang soldering iron.)

But it’s Gemma who must be convinced, so the plot threads start dutifully, joylessly unspooling. The main one involves a renegade robot named AMELIA, played by Ivanna Sakhno. She’s built from M3GAN tech, but lacks M3GAN’s compunction against killing innocent people. The other subplots have to do with the FBI, the fraught relationship between Gemma and Cady, a tech bro played by Jemaine Clement, another one played by Aristotle Athari, and the big tech MacGuffin that all the above-named parties are desperately searching for.

It’s a lot, and it’s why M3GAN 2.0 ends up feeling less like an upgrade and more like the DLC expansion pack no one asked for. All that extraneous narrative stuff does – eventually – convince Gemma to rebuild and retool M3GAN, and that’s good news. But there’s so much of it that it only serves to keep pushing M3GAN offscreen. And when the formula for your movie is as ruthlessly simple as this one is (M3GAN onscreen = fun, M3GAN offscreen = less so), it doesn’t compute.

Eventually, however, M3GAN 2.0 locks in enough to deliver on the promise, and the premise, of the first film. It flirts with fan service by winking at the memes you fully expect it to. (There’s another dance sequence, for example, and another moment when M3GAN launches into a ballad. The choice of ballad this time around, plus its employment at a specific juncture in the script, combine to produce a scene that’s much funnier than the one it evokes from the first film.)

And despite the new film’s midsummer drop date (the first movie snuck into theaters in January) expect no major budgetary glow-up. Like its predecessor, M3GAN 2.0 remains bracingly, confidently, even defiantly, a B-movie. There’s still a kind of modest, lo-fi quality to the proceedings; the effects are practical, the fight choreography (the last act features lots of robot-on-robot violence) impresses, but doesn’t dazzle.

Which is why the transition from M3GAN to M3GAN 2.0 isn’t so much Alien to Aliens, or Terminator to T2. It’s more Weekend at Bernie’s to Weekend at Bernie’s II. I can’t help but respect that.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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