AI doll M3GAN grows up for this campy techno thriller sequel
M3GAN 2.0
★★★
M, 119 minutes
Conspiracy theorists might make something of the fact that M3GAN, a film about a sinister artificially intelligent talking doll, had its US premiere in December 2022, a week or so after ChatGPT was unleashed on the public.
Since then, AI fatigue has set in to the point where the prudent choice for filmmakers would be to avoid the subject altogether, especially as M3GAN 's real-life equivalents don't threaten to take over the world so much as drown us in a sea of cliches.
But a hit is a hit, and so Gerard Johnstone, the talented New Zealand director of the original, is back for another round with the clumsily titled M3GAN 2.0, this time working from his own script, even if this isn't the version of Hollywood success he might have mapped out for himself in his dreams.
Voiced by YouTube personality Jenna Davis and embodied by the young dancer Amie Donald in an animatronic mask, M3GAN started out as a caramel-haired waif about the same size as her orphaned eight-year-old owner Cady (Violet McGraw), but with considerably more adult poise.
Since her body was destroyed at the end of the first film, for a while she's reduced to a ghost in the machine, haunting Cady's aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), the tightly-wound roboticist who came up with the idea for a high-tech doll in the first place.
Before long M3GAN is back on the earthly plane in a new form – but the changes aren't just physical. In the first film, she was a classic case of good intentions gone wrong, programmed to keep Cady safe at all costs, and racking up a significant kill count in the process.
Somewhere along the line, though, Johnstone or his overseers have decided that a cool-eyed, stylish, outwardly demure killing machine prone to quips such as 'Hang onto your vaginas' is simply too fabulous to be treated as a simple villain.
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