In retrospect, the red-carpet rollout for Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 back in February was always a little strange, almost as much as the fact that it was positioned as a summer tentpole. Most modestly-budgeted horror movies don’t get Super Bowl spots, even if they’re “primed for viral engagement” or whatever, but I guess Universal saw F1’s budget and assumed it was vulnerable (tracking is proving them plenty wrong). Even stranger is the fact that the first M3GAN was a January release — the box office conditions which justified a sequel are, it turns out, much harder to recreate when you place a mediocre horror flick up against AAA competition. But, after all, we live in a world now dominated by talk of AI and its promises, and M3GAN had the benefit of coming right before the Fed hiked interest rates and suddenly converted every free-wheeling venture capitalist willing to set money ablaze to make the next Uber into a miserly singularity accelerationist. If you wanted to nail that funding round, tossing those two letters about was a surefire way to get some attention, even if it didn’t really make any sense for your particular product or service. Worse, those rich men and their intellectual sycophants decided their tech should be feared rather than useful, and this franchise anticipated that shift at the right cultural moment.
It’s quickly apparent in M3GAN 2.0 that this apocalyptic shift in perspective has shaped the sequel’s expanded scope at the expense of coherence and logical consistency. Gemma (Allison Williams) is no longer a roboticist working for a toy company, but she’s not exactly a responsible guardian for Cady (Violet McGraw), even though she spent the entire last feature having it shoved in her face how much she sucked at parenting. Instead, she becomes a roboethicist, writing books about how too much screen time hurts kids, dating fellow tech industry giants, and giving TED talks to establish her thought leadership. Actually, never mind — this is great and realistic character development for the kind of tech figure she represents, who can never quite cleave narcissistic self-involvement from her attempts to change for the better. That’s about all there is to it, though, and, in short, she still sucks as an anti-hero. She’s also bad at cybersecurity, which is why the US Military wound up with M3GAN’s schematics and created their own bastardized version of the murderbot.
Dubbed AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), she quickly proves she’s a little more capable than M3GAN was at dispatching scores of human beings, going rogue and killing a hostage that she was sent to rescue. This is bad, but it gets worse when you discover the man in question was a chemical warfare expert and that she lifted a potent neurotoxin from him after she made her escape. The government thinks that Gemma’s behind all of this, somehow, and she’s equally mystified by a weird series of events that happened around the same time. So much of her life feels… unnaturally lucky. Her rent for a palatial duplex in the heart of San Francisco is astonishingly cheap. She finds herself unexpectedly in rooms with powerful people seemingly by accident, and her book sells surprisingly well for a first-time author with little relevance. It’s almost like there’s… a ghost in the machine somewhere. Who could that be, I wonder?
So, yeah: By now, you might have figured that this is a bot vs. bot showdown, and Johnstone goes out of his way to wear his influences on his sleeve. Terminator 2 is the most obvious point of comparison, but if you look carefully, you’ll see allusions to Metropolis, Short Circuit, and even Rocky IV. It’s an ambitious task for a sequel to try and pay “homage” to one of the best sequels the medium has ever produced, much less a Fritz Lang masterpiece, and the film just doesn’t have the goods. It’s less intentionally parodic than it is flippant, with the kind of grating PG-13 humor sapped straight from the Whedon ether, which hack writers draw power from like Chaos in Warhammer 40k. There are some good jokes here, and all of them are rooted in a decent evolution of a character’s arc in the first film. I mentioned Gemma’s, but Cady’s is also particularly amusing: having decided to learn self-defense skills after M3GAN’s rampage, she chooses an idol and pursues his specialized martial art. It just happens that she’s hyped up on Steven Seagal and decides to learn aikido, which is a fantastic pairing for a precocious pre-teen with a depressive temperament. But it’s somehow less funny than T2 (which is not a comedy!) and has fewer quality action scenes than a Short Circuit movie, to say nothing of the complete lack of scares.
What I think Johnstone struggled with here was what I like to call “the Sharknado trap.” You make a knuckle-draggingly stupid cheap horror picture and find that, because of self-aware marketing, it’s a hit and that people are laughing, and hey, it was meant to be funny in the first place! When it comes time to make a sequel, you react to that by overdoing it, turning the unintentional camp that kept everyone entertained between intentional gags into intentional self-parody. In Johnstone’s case, he falls back on his key skillset – he was a comedy director in his native New Zealand — and does everything he can to replicate the conditions of that attention-grabbing hallway dance from the first film without realizing that the unintentional goofiness was what made that work so well (just think of its placement in the trailers for the movie, where it was the key “scary” tease at the end). As it goes with intentional camp, the presence of intent negates the possibility of the latter, and there’s no real attempt at parody to push it over the line into straight comedy, as much as you can feel Johnstone wanting to go in that direction.
There’s also no reason for this movie to be two hours long – extended digressions featuring Gemma’s colleagues (now working for her tech start-up building exoskeletons) and M3GAN’s own misadventures (trying to trap the gang in her version of the Batcave, making amends for all those people she killed) slow the pace down to a drag. In short, much like the AI craze (are we allowed to use the word “fad” yet?), M3GAN 2.0 shows the franchise has thoroughly worn out its welcome, though it does come close to realizing my hopes for my dream AI project, which would be the equivalent of taking Weird Science and grafting the last third of Joe Dante’s Explorers, in which the aliens that River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke want to meet so badly that they build a rocket ship to reach them turn out to be even dumber than we are.
We need the AI superintellegence movie that accurately replicates the experience of being told by one of the main programs that a recovering addict should be allowed a little meth, as a treat, to get through a shift, or that rocks are a perfect addition to one’s diet. And besides, the world of AI-assisted or related art in this era peaked with @fatfellas on IG, so we’ve got nowhere to go but down. M3GAN 2.0 is just one of many terrible stops on the descent.