M3GAN 2.0 Parent Guide

Two years after her little robotics project went on a murder spree, Gemma (Allison Williams) is now a public spokesperson for AI regulation. She’s working with her new boyfriend Christian’s (Aristotle Athari) non-profit, and managing her own company on the side - but they’ve been struggling to keep the doors open. And her relationship with her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) isn’t going brilliantly, either. As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Gemma has bigger problems.

Seeing how “successful” M3GAN (Amie Donald) could be as a kid’s toy, the military rushed development on a new, tactically advanced combat android called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno). AMELIA worked brilliantly until it went rogue and, you guessed it, got started on a good old fashioned international murder spree. Who could have guessed? AMELIA is working her way back through every single person who had anything to do with building her and, since the military shamelessly stole Gemma’s work on M3GAN, that means Gemma and Cady can expect a visit very shortly – but what can they do to stop a super-advanced combat robot?

Unlike the original M3GAN, this sequel isn’t a horror flick. Think more of a Bratz Doll rehash of Terminator 2 at a PG-13 rating – and, yes, this film is about as weird as that sounds. The two-hour runtime is grossly excessive, and the movie keeps throwing flashbacks at you of things that happened fifteen minutes ago in this very same movie. Apart from making me wonder if the film has been edited for an audience comprised of goldfish, it’s just the worst kind of bloat.

The movie has a couple of bigger issues, though. Most glaringly, literally everything Gemma says is completely wrong. Anytime she says something about what’s happening around her, it is a guarantee that the opposite is true, and this becomes apparent maybe 15 minutes into the movie. Once you notice this, there’s no tension to be had anywhere, so this action thriller is now down to action. And the action is, believe it or not, pretty robotic, and not really in a fun way.

That PG-13 rating is fair, although there’s still some pretty bloody violence strewn about the script including decapitation, electrocution, and impalement, so this is wildly unsuitable for kids. Sexual content is limited to M3GAN’s occasional crude innuendo, and she’s also responsible for most of the profanity. It isn’t grossly unsuitable for a teenage audience, though, and I while expect they’ll have fewer issues with the uneven writing, I still think there are better ways to spend your time.

About author

Keith Hawkes

Keith Hawkes graduated from Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada with a degree in English and History. His interests are movies, American literature, science fiction, almost every kind of music, and museums. He enjoys criticizing films for fun - although he's okay with being paid for it.