M3GAN 2.0 recalls one of the greatest sequels of all time, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Both feature a killer robot from the first movie that was such a hit with fans, it was revived as the hero in the second movie. (With a new and improved model taking over as villain.) Both robots retain something of their lethal nature and naughty tendencies, but have been programmed specifically not to harm humans.

M3GAN 2.0 also recalls another of the greatest sequels of all time, Aliens. Which, like Terminator 2, was directed by James Cameron. Aliens pulled off the unlikely feat of switching genres from the first movie, taking the sci-fi horror of Alien and transforming into sci-fi action, with great success. M3GAN 2.0 takes the horror comedy of M3GAN and turns it into … a tech thriller? A dystopian action movie? With a level of success that will be the subject of this review.

What M3GAN 2.0 doesn’t have in common with those movies is the quality. While it could be argued that both Terminator 2 and Aliens improved on the original, M3GAN 2.0 is clearly a step back – a downgrade, if you will – from M3GAN, and the above traits have something to do with it.

It doesn’t start out that way. Gerard Johnstone’s film picks up a few years after the titular artificial intelligence doll, which got a bit murdery with a paper cutter in the first film, was deactivated with prejudice. Terminated, if you will. But the technology still exists, and we see an infinitely more lethal version, in the form of actress Ivanna Sakhno, unfold itself from a suitcase and take out an entire room of bad guys on foreign soil. The tech they call AMELIA – that’s an acronym, but we won’t bother to spell it out – was supposed to go in and extract a scientist held captive by these bad guys. But she kills him too. It’s the first sign she’s not under the control of the shady government bigwigs who commissioned her.

Gemma (Alison Williams), the inventor of the tech, has been beating quite a different drum since the doll nearly killed her and her niece Cady (Violent McGraw), who has been Gemma’s charge since Cady’s parents died at the start of the first movie. MEGAN swore to protect Cady after being paired to her, but that oath didn’t say anything about anyone who got in her way, even Gemma. So Gemma has realised there’s no place for this kind of technology and has been holding public speaking engagements to that effect, not to mention writing a book.

Ah, but a good AI can’t stay down for long. It turns out that MEGAN’s original processor core, or whatever, was able to inhabit Gemma’s smart home, which she acquired with the help of a little computer-assisted credit card fraud. In order to quell the threat AMELIA presents to Gemma and Cady, and to the world at large, MEGAN will need a body again – and all the risk that that implies.

This sounds like a good place to take the story, containing the look and feel of the original and all its possibilities for outrageous humour, right? There’s some great brutality in AMELIA’s psychotic killing spree, and Gemma’s initial imprisonment of MEGAN’s persona inside a cute blue helper robot, no more threatening than a Smurf, is a good way to take the piss out of MEGAN and get us laughing again.

But the look and feel of the first film quickly dissipates, swallowed up by technobabble and other nonsense. Despite its obvious absurdities, M3GAN was underpinned by the realism of being only a small degree removed from plausible technology. It was also emotionally grounded by the script’s commitment to the adjustments being made by these characters, Cady to no longer having parents and Gemma to being a parent. That created the perfect hole for the AI companion to fill, and fill it she did, with malevolent glee.

The malevolent glee is largely gone here, and so is the horror genre. We don’t come to a M3GAN movie to see people swiping screens in secret underground laboratories with impossibly complex layouts, which maniacal villains can destroy with ten-minute self-destruct sequences, while everyone engages in expository dialogue about how things work and what their plans are to take it out. The covert operations that grow out of this are more suited to a Mission: Impossible movie than a horror about a psychotic doll.

Where’s the humour? Johnstone and his co-writers, Akela Cooper and James Wan, recognise the need for it. The humour was why the first movie became an unlikely hit, and has also been a key component in the success of some of Wan’s films as director. As a nudge in that direction, they’ve cast Kiwi Jemaine Clement as a tech bro in the Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg mould, a natural rival for Gemma who wants to take over the tech and also make lascivious remarks about her. Clement’s brand of comedy is not the same as the straight-faced comedy in M3GAN, and it doesn’t take the movie very far. Then it’s abandoned entirely, in favour of AIs taking down the banking systems and robots fighting each other.

The look and feel of the title character has also suffered, and it’s not just her personality, though we’ll get to that in a moment. This movie doesn’t look cheap for the most part, but the appearance of the doll varies widely, sometimes looking like entirely a CGI creation with no sense of presence in the space, others approaching greater actuality in that uncanny way of the original film, only slightly blurry in a manner that makes it look like temporary FX. The mismatch between the doll’s lips and its words, at least a somewhat intentional choice, also feels like a glitch.

Johnstone et al have gotten wrong what it was we loved about that AI companion, and why that meme of her dancing took off. This is a badass technological brat that doesn’t take shit from anybody. Here, they’ve neutered her into a sensitive sook who would rather soothe you with therapist speak – genuinely, without irony – than reduce you with withering insults. M3GAN 2.0 is pretty reduced, alright.

 

M3GAN 2.0 is currently playing in cinemas.