Flasz On Film

The activation energy for a sequel to be greenlit at the house of Blum is small enough that even a moderately successful genre excursion stands a good chance of spawning a franchise of its own, especially when—in spirit of most Blumhouse outings—their typically modest budgets render even modest hits incredibly profitable. But when a movie brings in considerable money and briefly penetrates the epidermis of popular culture and generates a non-zero meme potential, it’s really a no-brainer. Which is what M3GAN did.  

Seeing how audiences responded to the Gerard Johnstone-directed play on Child’s Play filtered through Black Mirror-esque tech anxiety and served with slickness of a recent Leigh Whannell product, it was natural for the producers to immediately get together and orchestrate a follow-up within the next few years, hoping the cultural cache of the movie was resilient enough for people to remember it. And to be perfectly frank, what most people did take home having seen M3GAN at the time of its original release was probably the image of a dancing killer robot (Amie Donald) and an image of her running upsettingly like a dog. The rest was up for discussion. 

M3GAN 2.0 had an opportunity to effectively rebrand itself as the new-and improved iteration of the Chucky franchise and bank on a classic slasher idea of the killer coming back to the picture through magical happenstance or another technological marvel and reunite with Cady (Violet McGraw), a young girl she had sworn to protect at all cost in the previous movie. Chucky spent several movies chasing after Andy, so it would follow if M3GAN retained a similar motivation of a clingy robot girlfriend coming back from the dead to annihilate everything that poses even a hint of a threat to Cady. A bit like Child’s Play in reverse.  

However, the filmmakers decided to zoom out and noticed that what they had on their hands was potentially much more powerful than a simple techno-slasher franchise with a recurring villain motif. M3GAN had a chance and a workable route towards becoming a camp parody franchise rooted in lampooning pop cultural nostalgia with some camp heft to it, and a healthy-enough dose of self-awareness to remain superficially self-serious while making light of itself too.  

Instead of simply going bigger-harder-more, M3GAN 2.0 behaves exactly like a well-crafted update on a successful piece of software. Nobody wants to spend money on more of the same; what customers usually want from a version 2.0 of anything is for bugs and nuisances to be removed, for new features to be added and for the piece of software to do more while it does the thing it originally did but faster and better.  

Therefore, as you can expect, M3GAN 2.0 still remains somewhat married to its techno-Child’s Play genesis and a finely balanced cringey tongue-in-cheekness with a penchant for genre indulgence, but it opens up the world to a slew of absurdities that are just as catchy and fun to follow as they are eye-rollingly embarrassing in principle. In fact, instead of pretending the killer AI-enabled doll was an isolated fluke, the filmmakers expand the scope of the movie immediately by turning her creator, Gemma (Allison Williams), into an anti-AI crusader by day and a robotics entrepreneur by night who attempts to undermine the incoming tsunami of autonomous robotics coming to replace us by building an alternative… which is essentially a play on the Iron-Man suit. Which makes her a bit of a tongue-in-cheek parody of Tony Stark.  

Meanwhile, we find out that her M3GAN technology had somehow leaked out into the world and applied by the military (or so it would seem) to create AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), an autonomous AI-enabled assassin robot who goes rogue and sets out on a path where the safety of both Gemma and Cady will end up threatened. That is until they find out that the AI powering M3GAN survived the first movie and began rebuilding itself, allegedly to protect Cady from that new sophisticated killer robot, but also to stop it from getting ahold of some old-school AI locked in a bunker somewhere.  

You don’t have to have a master’s degree in film history to see what’s on display here and that M3GAN 2.0, like a well-executed upgrade on its predecessor, taps into quite a bit of pop cultural space with immense glee and reckless abandon. What the movie quickly lets us know is that it wants to have the kind of fun with genre tropes the early movies of Adam Wingard had (remember You’re Next and The Guest?) before he made a jump to the MonsterVerse.  

The way the movie traverses these multiple concepts plucked from T2, Iron-Man, Upgrade, and even the most recent Mission: Impossible movies while infusing the plot with off-the-cuff pop cultural references to such goofy ideas as Steven Seagal worship (which is also unsubtly-yet-funnily woven into the plot machinations), 80s and 90s villain clichés and even making light of the kind of quippy, mainstream-friendly humour Marvel has turned into an industrial product makes M3GAN 2.0 an incredibly entertaining and watchable experience. It’s just so much fun to see how the filmmakers shamelessly pull entire sequences from Upgrade and then proceed to insinuate that a wheelchair-bound tech-bro boss (Jemaine Clement) is a weird blend between Elon Musk, Doctor Evil and Doc Ock only to swiftly revert to the robot-v-robot shenanigans straight out of a Terminator sequel.  

Taken together, and I truly do mean what I say even though it might read like an attempt at trolling the still numerous Marvel drones out there, M3GAN 2.0 does a better job being a comic book movie than most bona fide comic book movies out there. It’s fun, lighthearted, elevated and just about stupid enough to function as an equivalent to what passes for a modern blockbuster these days while also running circles around the so-called real blockbusters in terms of its own film IQ. I know this might look like an exaggeration but M3GAN 2.0 just made my summer with its winks and nods casually sprinkled over top of the entire movie—and did I mention that little brief moment where M3GAN in an attempt to rebuild her own body ends up looking like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit?—endless callbacks to its own inside jokes and a plot template clearly taking the piss out of just how precious blockbusters are about their anti-tech stance.

It is to be expected that in the age of chatbots invading our lives and the looming threat of automation coming not only for blue-collar workers whom liberal journos had previously and advised that they should learn to code, but also for those cushy white-collar positions too, movies will immediately reflect that and position artificial intelligence as the default villain to use in entertainment. Some do it better than others (remember Companion?) and I think it needs to be shared far and wide that both M3GAN and M3GAN 2.0 should not be seen as off-beat camp genre pieces, but rather as playful and incredibly fun trendsetters that funnel all the relevant references into an incredibly watchable cinematic experience that balances perfectly at the razor-thin boundary between serious Capital-E entertainment and an over-the-top spoof laughing at the entire legacy of Hollywood entertainment; a task that is much harder than it looks.  

In an era drowning in self-important techno-thrillers and AI paranoia—again, with varying results—it’s a gift to have a movie that knows it’s ridiculous and revels in it. If Adam Wingard left a void in meta-aware genre fun, Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 steps in with meme-fueled swagger, a killer grin and a wink that says: yes, we know what we’re doing. And it’s an absolute blast, cringey dance moves, Steven Seagal charades, sassy J.A.R.V.I.S vibes and the whole gloriously absurd caboodle.