M3GAN 2.0: riotous action sequel to the comedy-horror hit about a killer doll

The low-budget hit "M3GAN" is back for a sequel, and this version is a different model – which is all to the good, said Michael Ordoña on The Wrap. In the first film, toy designer and programmer Gemma (Allison Williams) created M3GAN, a life-size robot doll, to take care of her orphaned niece.

Unfortunately, M3GAN took its "prime directive too far", leading to gory deaths and, ultimately, the doll's destruction. M3GAN's AI consciousness survived, however, and in this new film, Gemma (now an advocate for more government oversight of AI) recreates her to fight off AMELIA – another robot, created by a US defence contractor, that is even more dangerous, and which has also gone rogue.

Too often, horror sequels are just "bigger and bloodier" rehashes of the original. But the makers of this one have done something clever, which is to move away from horror altogether: "M3GAN 2.0" is a roller coaster of an action film, with some very funny comedy elements.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It's basically a "hyper-camp mash-up" of "Terminator 2" and "Mission: Impossible", said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. The "conflagration of tones and ideas" is somewhat bizarre, but part of the fun is not knowing which genre it's going to pluck from next, as it oscillates between "sincere reflections on the nature of parenthood, an inter-android dialogue about autonomy and sentience, and extended martial arts fight scenes".

Co-starring Jemaine Clement as a Musk-like tech billionaire working on neural chips, the film also muses on the unregulated power of Silicon Valley, said John Nugent in Empire, to add "a riot of timely tech paranoia" to the fun thrill ride. The plot, it has to be said, is incoherent as well as implausible; but "M3GAN 2.0" is nevertheless "ridiculously" entertaining.