# M3 Two
M3GAN was one of the surprises of 2023, at least in terms of buzz and box office intake It also demonstrated a little bit more thoughtfulness and sharp satire than “dancing TikTok murderbot” would intrinsically suggest. Its clever little twist was that it was, in fact, a critique of two parenting styles: it is more obviously a jab at the hands-off, all-screens parenting that Gemma (Allison Williams) uses on Cady (Violet McGraw), but it also criticizes the high-pressure, achievement-focused “parenting” that Gemma uses on M3GAN (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis) herself. The pacing was a little droopy, and it was more an achievement of marketing than of filmmaking, but I have warm, or at least tepid, memories of it.
And so inevitably M3GAN 2.0 hit us with a bigger budget and bigger storytelling ambitions. It is sillier, louder, and less coherent than M3GAN by several large degrees. It piles on twists and shiny new “what-if” narrative ideas. On paper, this is exactly what I’d suggest of a M3GAN sequel: go big or go home.
The plot is illegible mayhem, but here’s a taste of it anyways: Two years on, Gemma has reinvented herself as a public advocate for AI oversight. Cady is fourteen now and resents that the commotion from M3GAN is still a part of her life, and also quietly misses her murderous best friend. In the meantime, Gemma and her old colleagues Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps) have been tinkering with a new invention, an exoskeleton that grants superhuman strength. This draws the attention of Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement), a smarmy tech billionaire. At the same time, someone in the defense sector has gotten hold of M3GAN’s specs and built something considerably worse with them.
The film’s specific reference point is clearly Terminator 2: once-evil M3GAN allies with the good guys and schemes to take down a newer, badder, creepier doll: AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), who is casually committing acts of espionage and assassination. The first M3GAN movie was fairly light as horror, but M3GAN 2.0 completely ditches any pretense at terror and suspense, going full-throttle sci-fi action thriller.
The sequel, unfortunately, never fully gets off the ground, and that’s due to a few problems. The first is that old chestnut “less is more,” or, rather, its obvious corollary “more is less”: Simply coming back with the TikTok dancing robot, except now there’s two of them, is like suggesting the obvious palate cleanser to a bowl of pudding is two more bowls. M3GAN 2.0 tries to get ahead of this problem by pushing the story to its outer bounds: now M3GAN is battling international terrorists and such, not just an inattentive parent. But this just makes it all feel a little more ridiculous and untethered from reality, inadvertently upending whatever little stakes and human connection was in the first.
The bigger problem, at least for me, is context. (Spoiler warning and soapbox warning.) At the start of 2023 when M3GAN hit theaters, AI tools like ChatGPT were mostly a fun little novelty, albeit one being pushed with eye-rolling hype from tech companies. By 2025, AI had oversaturated culture and headlines, and the public tide was turning in a big way against the many insidious implications of large language model-generated content.
M3GAN 2.0 inevitably confronts this, but ends up with a centrist and defensive tone on AI: it’s just a tool, and extremists who either valorize it or demonize it are getting carried away. It’s a much more lukewarm take on AI than even the original, which clearly harbored AI skepticism. (I guess the Blumhouse and Atomic Monster teams learned to love the machine when M3GAN generated 9 figures of profit a couple years earlier.)
As of this writing, it is 2026, about a year after the M3GAN 2.0 release, and the movie’s half-assed politics and tone look even more cynical, even odious. Some of this film’s insinuations imply a horseshoe theory in which anyone too opinionated on the technology in either direction is an bloviating, misguided fool. We don’t blame hammers when a building collapses, right? 🤮 But in reality, especially the last year, most of the AI CEOs have made their unabashed public heel turns, and AI-skeptical solidarity has gained quite a bit of traction. As with most worthy causes, the protestors aren’t self-serving, hypocritical radicals like M3GAN 2.0’s Christian (Aristotle Athari) but rather working class and middle class concerned citizens who don’t want their environment, economy, and rights completely borked. Imagine that.
Anyways, I’ll step away from the megaphone, but the truth is that M3GAN 2.0’s politics really colored my second viewing of the film one year on, tilting from shrugging acceptance of this slice of mid-budget genre fun to an exhausted resentment of it. Unlike, say, The Incredibles, the story and form of M3GAN 2.0 just aren’t invigorating enough to shake me out of the icky feeling I get when I think too much about the movie’s implications.
Which is a shame, because there is indeed a fun energy to this film, and I don’t want to (entirely) bury it under my own editorializing. The action is a genuine upgrade from M3GAN, and unlike the original, it’s doled out across the runtime. Gerard Johnstone, back in the director’s chair, stages the varied action sequences with intensity and clear blocking. The film throws in lots of fun twists on the action: What if M3GAN’s AI brain took control of other robotic creatures of different shapes and sizes? What if Allison Williams put on her exoskeleton armor and had her own proper fight scene? Etc. The franchise’s self-aware faux-camp survives the genre swap decently well, and the movie leans into the promise of the premise where the original withheld it until the last act. The musical moments are well-done, including an inspired Kate Bush selection that made me laugh out loud. The movie is frequently, deliberately funny.
The cast is solid enough at what they’re being asked to do: Sakhno is the standout as AMELIA, doing what Donald does as M3GAN (artificially stiff movement and uncanny but intimidating physical carriage) but even better and with way more action chops. She gets the best fight scenes in the film, and M3GAN 2.0 would easily be a tier worse if not for the zest AMELIA brings in her scenes, though she’s not quite as visually distinct. The movie even lets AMELIA steal some of the big action climax from M3GAN. Elsewhere, McGraw has upgraded from outright liability to replacement level performance; the Gemma-Cady relationship is not the most interesting part of the movie, but it’s not a total drag, which is a win. The Alton Appleton character, meanwhile, is as fun as you would expect Jemaine Clement playing a sleazy tech bro to be, which is to say he could have used about forty percent more screen time before getting murdered.
M3GAN 2.0 is not soulless. It would be easy to toss it aside as such: the sequel to the biggest meme horror hit of 2023, a year that had several of them. (Alas, no Cocaine Bear 2: This Time It’s Heroin as far as I can tell.) The IP gets its mandated second lap, but people clearly assembled M3GAN 2.0 with confidence and at least some vision of how to keep “dancing TikTok murderbot” fresh. It’s just too much, and therefore too little. Somebody had ten ideas for what a sequel should be and loved all ten. I genuinely can’t decide whether I’m glad they put everything out there in an uninhibited romp, or disappointed they didn’t apply more restraint to find the best kernels to expand on.
It’s all a bit sweaty in the final product regardless your feeling on the moral implications of its content, and I’m not the only one who thought so: The film underperformed badly enough that Blumhouse has reportedly been rethinking the rapid-fire low-budget theatrical horror model that made them Blumhouse in the first place. Failure at that level, which closes doors rather than opens them, is a genuinely dispiriting outcome.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.