M3GAN 2.0 (United States, 2025)

Have I ever before used the phrase “unspeakable dreck”? I don’t remember; maybe I was saving it up for this movie. It’s not the worst thing I have seen but it’s among the year’s most soulless, unentertaining slogs. The first M3GAN was kind of fun in an undemanding sort of way – an sci-fi tinged horror flick with flashes of dark humor. Now, M3GAN was far from perfect but it didn’t need to be with its countless meme-able moments. One of the nicest things about the movie was that it felt like a good old-fashioned stand-alone film – something designed to tell an entire story in 102 minutes without the need for sequels and spin-offs. However, while that may have been the initial idea, it went out the window once the domestic box office inched close to $100M. Thus was born the bloated, beached whale that is M3GAN 2.0.

There is ample evidence that director Gerard Johnstone is a Terminator fan and he has doubled-down on the similarities this time around. We have the former villain now turned into an anti-hero. We have a new turbo-powered upgrade that she must prevent from killing the child she is protecting. We have AI threatening to become sentient and take over the world. The only things missing are Arnold Schwarzenegger and time travel.

M3GAN 2.0 is two hours long – which gives it far too much rope to hang itself. Strangely, however, it feels incredibly rushed with subplot after subplot squashed together and exposition dumps around every corner. Johnstone seems to have misheard the golden rule. Instead of “show don’t tell,” he thinks it’s “tell, don’t show.” The movie is as needlessly confusing as it is boring. The horror elements are almost completely gone. This is bad science fiction mixed with worse comedy. Not since Crocodile Dundee 2 can I remember a sequel going so far off the rails with a second installment because it had zero clue where to take the story. So what does Johnstone do? He gets the band back together, makes a new, deadlier version of MEGAN (called AMELIA), and tries really hard to cram as many meme-able moments into the running length as possible. However, where those were organic in the first movie, there’s instead a sense of desperation amidst the artificiality here.

The movie picks up about two years after the events of the first film. Cady (Violet McGraw) and her aunt, Gemma (Allison Williams), are experiencing a strain in their “mother-daughter” relationship tied to Gemma’s lack of availability. She spends a lot of time crusading against parents abdicating their responsibilities to electronic babysitters while developing a romantic relationship with noted anti-AI figure, Christian (Aristotle Athari). Meanwhile, with the help of tech billionaire Alton Appleton (Jermaine Clement), the U.S. government has reconstructed Gemma’s previous work and built a newer, better version of the original M3GAN – the unstoppable AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), who quickly throws off her shackles and goes rogue. First mission: kill everyone associated with her creation. Since that puts Gemma and Cady in the cross-hairs, they reluctantly agree to bring back M3GAN (Amie Donald) from the cloud and give her a new body. That way, when AMELIA comes calling, they will have a defense.

The movie takes a full 45 minutes to get going. During that time, we get a lot of dumb comedy and quasi-preachy warnings about the dangers of AI and global Internet saturation. This is all background noise and wouldn’t have qualified as being insightful ten years ago, let alone today. I’m not sure whether Johnstone thinks he has something to say or whether this is an elaborate satire but it doesn’t work either way. We’re here to see M3GAN kill people in nasty, clever ways. But M3GAN, who has switched teams, doesn’t do much killing (that’s left up to AMELIA) and the movie is rated PG-13 so a lot of careful editing is involved. (Don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of the MPA giving this a PG-13 rating.)

The acting is atrocious. From wooden Allison Williams to sleazy Aristotle Athari to unfunny comic relief Brian Jordan Alvarez, it’s hard to find any human who approaches a credible level of performance. (The lone exception being Jermaine Clement, whose screentime, like his subplot, is truncated.) As for the two robots, they’re just creepy. It’s said that a major problem with deepfake recreations of human beings is the so-called “uncanny valley.” Well, while Grand Moff Tarkin may have visited there in Rogue One, M3GAN lives in that place on a permanent basis. It’s tough to accept something so off-putting as an heroic figure.

I have a low tolerance for useless, pointless sequels and an even lower one for those that pad out their running length in the mistaken belief that being longer somehow coveys legitimacy. Sitting through M3GAN 2.0 was an excruciating experience. It simply would not end. At some point, Johnstone seems to buy into the belief that viewers are invested in the story he’s telling when all they really want is to see the two robots go medieval on each other’s asses. We’re here for the nasty kills, the clever eviscerations, and the M3GAN vs. AMELIA rumble. And we get very little of any of those things. Hopefully, this franchise will crash before it’s allowed to upgrade to a 3.0.

M3GAN 2.0 (United States, 2025)