"M3GAN 2.0" 4K Review

 The 2023 slasher flick M3GAN was a sleeper hit, grossing $181M off a $12M budget. So a sequel was ordered up and a few weeks ago M3GAN 2.0 arrived, flopping massively with an opening weekend gross one-third of the original's leading to a rapid trip to streaming after just a few weeks. Complaints were that it changed genres - from horror to sci-fi - and attempted to turn the memeable moppet murderbot into a good girl a la Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but even more problematic is that the story is a convoluted mess that I don't even want to try and synopsize, but let's get on with it.

It's a couple years after the events of the first film and the military, having never seen the Jurassic Park sequels has decided to make a new murderbot called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, Pacific Rim) copied from M3GAN's designs. During an operational demonstration, it goes rogue after revealing it was sentient and not working for the Army any more.

Gemma (Allison Williams, Get Out), M3GAN's creator has become an author and advocate for AI regulation who, along with her (I think) boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari, SNL) has been developing an exoskeleton device which could provide mobility to the paralyzed or turn people into human forklifts capable of lifting great weights. Her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw, M3GAN), lives with her and is studying computer science.

After Gemma is informed of AMELIA's existence, M3GAN (body: Amie Donald; voice: Jenna Davis; the same team as before) reveals that she'd been living in Gemma's smart home after uploading her program before being killed, a la The Lawnmower Man. She offers to help them take down AMELIA in exchange for a physical body. Gemma doesn't trust her, so puts her into a Moxie unit - a toy robot thing clearly copied from Black Mirror's "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" episode (the one with Miley Cyrus as a pop star performing a rewritten version of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole") - in order to hack into wealthy tech billionaire creep Alton Appleton's (Jemaine Clement, Flight of the Conchords) servers to find out what's going on.

After AMELIA kills Alton, the group retreat to a massive bunker under Gemma's house that M3GAN had constructed with plans that they'd hide there when AMELIA triggers an AI Apocalypse. It was at this point my feelings on the movie flipped from "this isn't so bad" to "what the heck is this crap?!?" How the actual how does a secret underground lair get built under a residential home without anyone knowing?!? This isn't some billionaire superhero with the means to have Lairs 'r' Us build a Batcave under his estate where trucks full of mined earth can be removed without notice. If M3GAN can have this done, why does she need to beg Gemma to build her a body?

From there the plot gets even more convoluted and ludicrous involving a Xerox motherboard created in the early-1980s which as been learning for four decades and if someone were to remove it from its air-gapped Faraday cage it would provide Total Control Power of all tech in the world, blah-blah-woof-woof. There are so many red herrings, fakeouts, "oh no, M3GAN's dead, oh wait, no, she's not" twists and turns I stopped caring because the movie was just trying to be clever when it was braindead.

While director Gerald Johnstone came up with the story with M3GAN co-writer Akela Cooper, the final script was his and he sabotages himself with the spaghetti plot and cringe-worthy dialogue like, "Hold on to your vaginas," which is so dumb that a Speak & Spell wouldn't say it. While his direction is workmanlike, he limits himself by his on contrivances.

The 4K presentation is clean and has some good highlights at times, but who cares when the story is dumb?

The first M3GAN caught on with meme culture thanks to the goofy murder dance she does in the trailer, but under the hype was a neat 8/10 score (never finished the review) B-movie that delivered the goods promised on the tin. But in their desire to force another social media craze, they forgot that it's impossible to make fetch happen by brute force. Blumhouse head Jason Blum admitted they botched this one and while there's a spinoff film, SOULM8TE ("soulmate"), coming in January 2026, it's going to be difficult to resurrect the girl again without an exceptional concept and script. Too bad.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.