It’s no secret that 2022 killer android smash M3GAN was made as one film and released as another. Somewhere in the vaults there’s an R-rated horror cut of the film about robot companion M3GAN (body courtesy of Amie Donald, voice of Jenna Davis) who takes her job of protecting orphaned Cady (McGraw) a little too seriously. Then M3GAN doing a dance went viral on TikTok and reshoots and a hasty re-edit turned the film into a PG-13 crowd pleaser. It also turned it into a tonal mish-mash, with poor Allison Williams as M3GAN’s creator and Cady’s aunt, Gemma, literally in a different movie to everyone else.
So what happens when the cast and returning director and now writer Gerard Johnstone are all on the same page from moment one, and know exactly what kind of film they’re making?
Can you believe that it’s actually more tonally discordant than the first film?
The core audience of the M3GAN films, as proved by the volume 1 retool, is TikTok teens as they become twentysomethings. So why is there a major plot point built around Steven Segal’s 1990s filmography? Who knows? Who can possibly guess who this is meant for?
M3GAN felt old school because it was basically a classic killer robot film, only the robot was a cutesy tween, somewhere between Small Wonder and The Terminator. M3GAN 2.0 is a little smarter, in that it’s really about AI. While M3GAN’s mechanical frame was destroyed in the first film, she’s been lurking around on servers, continuing to keep a watchful eye on Cady and silently judging Gemma as she takes up a new career as an anti-AI activist. What forces her to quit being the ghost in the machine is the ol’ Terminator 2 of an even more deadly version of herself called AMELIA (Sakhno).
And this is where M3GAN 2.0 proves to be an inferior upgrade, like when you get a software update and it makes all the functions you love work worse and keeps pushing new, horrible widgets on you. Johnstone, who took over script duties from Akela Cooper, seems unsure whether he’s trying to make a goofy action flick, a Silicon Valley satire, or a serious point about the ubiquity, threats, and potential of AI. Somehow, what he pulls together is like an Austin Powers film that takes itself a little too earnestly before taking a wild third act turn into Superman III territory. And that’s never good.
Not all of this is Johnstone’s fault. After all, considering how long the film has been in production, he’s not to blame for its release coinciding with the recent U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But, right now, the opening sequence about AMELIA killing a scientist in an underground Iranian laboratory plays really awkwardly. All the rest of the film’s problems do come back to Johnstone, however, not least the unbelievable amount of exposition delivered by every single character to handhold the audience through a barely comprehensible and unnecessarily convoluted plot about AMELIA’s quest for a sentient fax machine. Yes, you read that right.
With M3GAN out of her recognizable body for most of the film, it becomes clear how much of the success of both films comes down to Davis’ delivery. Depending on what device M3GAN is operating at that time, she can be sardonic, threatening, or just have one-liners running at peak efficiency. If the franchise-fixated producers at Blumhouse and James Wan’s Atomic Monster insist on cranking out more duplicates, next time just let M3GAN be M3GAN.
This article appears in June 27 • 2025.
