Megan, the cyborg doll with an imagination-capturing, meme-generating self-possession, doesn’t properly appear on screen until around halfway through M3GAN 2.0, the sequel to her hit sorta-horror movie from 2022. In the meantime, we learn that Gemma (Allison Williams), Megan’s hapless creator, has a knack for the opportunistic pivot. Following the botched rollout of her A.I.-based parenting tool who happened to murder four people in order to “protect” Gemma’s orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw), she has reinvented herself as an anti-A.I. advocate. She even carries the ultimate in low-tech influencer accessories: a smug book about her parenting philosophy. Her dedication hasn’t exactly dissuaded Cady from her own interest in technology, though. She may even look upon her deleted guardian with some measure of nostalgia, much to Gemma’s chagrin.
On paper, Gemma’s new obsession is, if not a completely serious development, not purely satirical, either. But Williams, channeling a bit of her famous role as overprivileged yet underachieving Marnie on the TV series Girls, tilts the material in that direction. M3GAN 2.0 actually tilts in a number of directions, with returning director Gerard Johnstone (now also the screenwriter) clearly achieving his own self-awareness, much less hard-won, about how the memes kinda got in front of the movie with the original M3GAN. The smartest thing about the sequel is that it undergoes a pivot of its own: M3GAN 2.0 lands more science fiction than horror. Specifically, it seems to have in mind the transition from The Terminator (genuinely threatening sui generis sci-fi-horror foe) to Terminator 2 (harnessing the audience’s love of that foe to make them the good guy taking on a bigger, badder robot in a sci-fi action story).
Neither M3GAN movie is on the level of either Terminator, and Johnstone likely understand this, too; the supporting cast isn’t full of comedy performers because these movies believe in themselves as hardcore genre exercises. If anything, they have a little too much faith in their own built-in camp delights. Regardless, it’s a savvy move to introduce Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), a killer robot weaponizing the original Megan specs to serve as a potential tool of the military-industrial complex (and also seemingly designed to resemble the actress Elizabeth Olsen). When Amelia double-crosses her engineers and goes on her own hunt for an older, even more powerful A.I. tool, Gemma becomes convinced that the only way to take her down is to bring back the original Megan.
Actually, Megan herself convinces her of this, because she never really went away; she’s been hiding within some home-assistant software as hinted by the end of the first movie. It’s an important distinction because the movie regrettably takes a fair amount of time setting up plot that has been previously and more concisely explained in both the previous movie and trailers for this one. Even with a fair number of sci-fi ideas riffing lightly on mech-suits, neural implants, anti-tech crusading, and the capacity for artificial beings to grow and change, there is no reason for this particular lightweight movie to run two full hours. In between the big laughs that greet Gemma’s reinvention and the ridiculous fun of seeing Megan suit up for a bunch of unlikely spy missions, there’s a fair amount of bloatware.
Still: Megan, once again voiced by Jenna Davis and physically performed by a digitally augmented Amie Donald, remains an irresistibly uncanny invention, and her struggle of wills against Gemma is, if anything, more complicated this time around. So much so, in fact, that ultimately M3GAN 2.0 feels like it’s leaving rich psychosexual territory unmined, especially given Williams’ ability to plumb those depths in certain moments of Girls. The movie repeatedly hints that Gemma’s desire for world-beating control masks a Megan-like aggression and more than once, Megan uses her web-trawling abilities to tartly explain that she knows her would-be master’s preferences better than Gemma herself does. (Gemma’s romantic partner in anti-tech crusading, played by Aristotle Anthari, doesn’t make the cut.) If the first movie positioned them as feuding co-parents, this one pushes them into a bodily closeness that plenty of more horror-centric movies would kill to explore.
Alas, the Gemma/Megan power struggle gets muddled in with the movie’s ultimately uncertain approach to artificial intelligence. Johnstone, in turning Megan into an anti-heroine, clearly doesn’t want to repeat the expected condemnation of A.I., especially after ribbing Gemma’s didacticism. After all, robots discovering their humanity has been a sci-fi staple for ages. He doesn’t seem sure what to slot in place of dire warnings, though, and the movie flounders with a kind of wishy-washy techno-centrism that puts a damper on both satire and terror. Maybe that’s why it ends by whipping through a bunch of sci-fi plot points that aren’t always adequately explained, with various consciousnesses jumping from vessel to vessel, as if the filmmakers are hoping they land on something resonant.
Before that third-act pile-up and even during it, M3GAN 2.0 has too many moments of inspiration – mostly comic, but some sci-fi and action – to completely dismiss. It’s a little too pre-programmed and self-conscious to be truly witty, yet the tone it strikes and the genre space it carves out feels undeniably itself: part comedy, part sci-fi mayhem, with remnant notes of shlocky horror. It’s unabashedly not for the hardcore fans and weirdly kid-appropriate for much of its runtime, and it’s hard to think of a contemporary equivalent. (In that sense, it’s like a distant cousin of a later-period Universal monster mash, though Megan isn’t quite prepping for a Chucky title fight yet.) Is the movie secretly defending algorithms because it sympathizes with their mechanically desperate desire to please, or is it indulging in the kind of uneven eccentricity that no computer could ever generate on its own? It may take several more upgrades before the answer becomes clear.
Director: Gerard Johnstone Writer: Gerard Johnstone Starring: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Amie Donald, Ivanna Sakhno, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Aristotle Athari Release Date: June 27, 2025
