M3GAN 2.0, review: A riotous return for the viral psychotic doll
When the decision was made to produce a follow-up to M3GAN – the popular 2023 horror about an artificially intelligent doll that turns evil – writer-director Gerard Johnson faced what might be called the 'Jurassic Park problem'. In a sequel to a film in which a fun invention ends up causing the violent deaths of multiple innocent parties, how do you get one of the survivors to say with a straight face: 'Right then, guys, who's up for building another one?'
This uproarious (if not especially scary) sequel has the measure of the task at hand's silliness, and leans into it with infectious glee. However you thought a M3GAN sequel might begin, it probably wasn't with a helicopter shot of a desert compound and the caption: 'Somewhere near the Turkey-Iran border' – yet here we are, in a highly topical war zone, where an even nimbler and more murderous M3GAN successor, known as Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), is in the process of becoming a headache for the US secret services. The only way to bring this new rogue AI under control, it transpires, is to boot up the old one in all her prim, pussy-bowed glory – and hope that this time she decides to take humanity's side.
No one could argue that the original M3GAN carried itself like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: highlights included its title character singing Sia's Titanium and sashaying through a dance that subsequently went viral on TikTok. But this second chapter is so driven by antics – and wisely so – that it barely qualifies as horror at all. Tonally, the genre it most recalls, in fact, is a very specific one: films from the Eighties and Nineties, which you'd swear had originally been aimed at children but discover on rewatching that they're completely unsuitable for anyone below their mid-teens; think Gremlins, Kindergarten Cop, and so on.
There is relatively little here in the way of honest fright. Rather, as M3GAN's human creator Gemma (Allison Williams) becomes increasingly embroiled in her comeback, there are glamorous parties to infiltrate, concept cars to hijack – AI self-drivers, naturally – and heists to pull off, with the aid of chloroformed handkerchiefs.
M3GAN herself, played again by 14-year-old dancer Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis, is less spooky possessed doll than sassy robo-mascot, with dialogue that couldn't have been cattier if it had come from a Whiskas tin. In her temporary exoskeletal form, she reminds you of Johnny Five in the Short Circuit films – there's a lovely, tactile judder to her movements as she trundles around her lair – while Amelia's quadrupedal scuttle has a stop-motion feel that adds to the film's comic bite.
So too does Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement, who pops up as a smug, sleazebag tech bro, and comedian Aristotle Athari, who delivers a subtly berkish variant. And while Johnson's screenplay makes great play of the topicality of the AI debate, it adds – by design, I think – absolutely nothing of value to the discussion at all. Will clips of M3GAN 2.0 appear in AI documentaries 50 years from now, as an example of what we poor saps worried was on the horizon? Almost inevitably. But for now, its loopy verve is reassuringly human.
15 cert, 120 min. In cinemas from Friday June 27
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