Blumhouse has made a lot of low-budget horror films over the last fifteen years or so.  Most of the time, they make pretty good money, which justifies the making of them. One of the most successful in recent years was M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android) A movie based on a new take on an android character that goes crazy and tries to kill the people that created it and those it’s supposed to protect. In this case, a little girl. Heard this before? Yes, I know. Chuck comes to mind right away. This is nothing new. Somehow, people enjoyed this film, so the obvious happened. It got a sequel. This b**** is back! M3GAN 2.0 comes out this week in theaters. Does it live up to the original? Let’s discuss.

Gemma (Allison Williams) is trying to recover from her encounter with M3GAN the previous year. She had to change her business model and wrote a book about her ordeal. She’s still a mom of her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), who is now a 12 year old girl instead of a little girl. Together, they are trying to make things work. A new man has entered their lives. Christian (Aristotle Atari). He seems like the man they need in their lives. He’s against AI, or so he seems at first, and he cares about the pair. When a new android, Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), was created to do good and ends up killing though who had a hand in creating it, things start to get crazy again for the Williams and McGraw characters once again. They are drawn into the fray because of their knowledge of AI and so forth. Inevitably, they have to recreate M3GAN to help them fend off this new android threat to them and the world .

M3GAN (Jenna Davis, Amiens Donald) is a character that has multiple components literally and figuratively. She has a voice actress and a human that does the mocap.  With visual effects to show the android face.There is a fake look to her so as to not confuse this for a realistic girl. This time around, that fake look is much more obvious. There are a few seams where the CGI and live action don’t match up at all. Even the voice and movements of the mouth aren’t sunk up with each other very well. I hope this wasn’t intentional because it looked pretty bad. If it was on purpose, maybe they were trying to go for a campy look this time around. Who knows? I would have liked a more realistic version of the android girl myself. 

With the world going to hell in a handbasket right now, one of the big issues is AI and how we as a society can control the use of AI.This movie plays right into that.The main plot is about controlling AI and not letting big business and the owners of these companies have control of something so powerful.Jermaine Clement plays a big business character who is trying to control AI in this film. He is not as kooky or weird as he’s been before in his career. He tends to play this man a little straight.  This is a hot-button topic, and these movies play right into that fact. I, for one, want there to be some government oversight on the use and ownership of AI before it gets out of control. Not to the extent of what happens in this movie, but the world needs something before all hell breaks loose.

Besides Clement, the rest of the cast is pretty good in this sequel. The voice actress of M3GAN, Davis, is having a blast camping it up with plenty of zingers and one-liners. She knows the exact tone she needs to set as this character. Williams also knows the kind of movie this is, and she plays it pretty seriously despite all the craziness going on around her. I want to see her in more films in the future. McGraw is good, but she tends to play her role a little bit more reserved.  She’s a little older, and maybe that had something to do with her playing it closer to the vest. The rest of the supporting cast, Jen Van Epps, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Timm Sharp, and Atari are all solid. With Atarti doing a twist on an enigmatic genius character.  He was an enigma as a character, but this role was off nicely.

With the last M3GAN film, there were a couple of big action scenes. This sequel doesn’t have as many, but one big one at the end of the movie makes up for not having many. A couple involving  the Sakhno character were good.This big scene was a bit much, though. There was all kinds of stuff going on in this sequence. The inevitable fight between the two AI androids was a bit of a letdown. The choreography wasn’t very good, and the CGI on M3GAN threw me off. Also, she was in a weird costume I didn’t like very much. There was a lot of exposition in this action scene, and I would have rather seen more creative ways to have the androids fight each other. This scene just sums up this film as a whole. It’s not as good as it could have been.

M3GAN 2.0 isn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be after watching the second trailer, but after about an hour, I thought things were going pretty well. It was a letdown after that.  The story was making sense until it just got ridiculous involving the UN and was a bit over the top. This movie shouldn’t be trying to take itself so seriously.  It’s an android fighting another android with campy dialogue and wonky visual effects. Most of the actors are playing it pretty straightforward forward but Clement and Davis got the memo.They were hamming it up quite a bit. This sequel, though, was a mixed bag. For all the good stuff, there were some glaring bad things. Overall, I wasn’t completely disappointed with this sequel. It just didn’t do enough for me to recommend it. I’m sure many audiences will enjoy it, though. Especially if they don’t look too far into the story and acting performances like I did.

2 ½

Dan Skip Allen