All of the marketing for M3GAN 2.0 has abandoned any notion of the franchise being horror or satire, and just gone all-in on the idea that M3GAN is a sassy bitch who loves drama. Which had me expecting the worst, because what I liked so much about the first one was how it nailed (no offense to dog neighbor lady, RIP) its tone.
I don’t want to overstate the appeal of M3GAN, because it’d be revisionist history to claim that it was a brilliantly insightful classic. But I thought it was a ton of fun, and downright masterful in how it made the movie itself reflect the creepiness of its main character: it never settled fully into camp or fully into horror, always remaining in the uncanny valley where everything just felt off.
A perfect example of that was how M3GAN would spontaneously launch into song at odd moments, to help Katie come to terms with her emotions. It was corny but sincere, awkward and unexpected and just plain weird.
After I realized that M3GAN 2.0 is more broadly comedic than its predecessor, and doesn’t even pretend to be a horror franchise anymore, but more cheesy 1980s hyper-violent action thriller, I settled into just enjoying it for what it was. It still had flashes of very clever people making something deliberately silly — a bad guy gets his entire head punched off in the first five minutes! — and a casting decision that I hadn’t been spoiled for and was a terrific surprise. (In retrospect, the trailers were actually fantastic for not giving away some of the movie’s best surprises).
But then, in the middle of a scene I was already liking anyway, M3GAN starts singing at an unexpected moment. And it was sublime. Without exaggeration, the most I’ve laughed in a movie in years.
Until that point, the movie had been coasting along as a shallow action comedy, with just enough flashes of cleverness to remind you that it’s the case of a bunch of smart people having fun being silly. It’s all on the level of the aforementioned artful decapitation, or including the theme from a 1980s TV series at an opportune moment.
It also did something that I don’t think I’ve seen before, where the introductory exposition has clips from news shows not just reporting on the events of the first movie, but explicitly recapping the theme of it. It’s unusual for a sequel to so bluntly say, yeah, this is what the first one was about.
But then there’s an extended sequence of the team working to rebuild M3GAN, that felt like the moviemakers finally trying to rebuild M3GAN. It’s full of the flashes that made the first one a genuinely clever satire, instead of just an opportunistic Chucky for Girls. It really leans into how bonkers this movie’s alternate universe is, and how creepy M3GAN is. Her attempts to rebuild herself have resulted in a wiry-haired abomination with huge eyes and exposed teeth, and the eyebrow servos are accentuated to show how unsettling it is when she tries to emote. Even when she gets her old face back, there’s an excellent moment that leans into her wrongness as she tries to make amends with one of the team.
Then there’s the scene between Allison Williams’ Gemma and M3GAN. Where the movie decides it’s had enough fun skipping along the surface of a goofy comedy, and it wants to actually be about something, which in this case is motherhood and responsibility. It’s surprisingly well-written, with Gemma actually acknowledging how much of this is her fault, and M3GAN revealing she’s more self-aware than we’d thought as well.
The scene is sublime for so many reasons. The song choice is so perfect, both for maintaining the “I Love the 80s” vibe of the movie, and for being so weird and yet so tonally appropriate. The song is extraordinarily, almost uncomfortably sincere, the power of the original version coming largely from how fearless and heartfelt the performance is, and how it would’ve fallen into mawkish sentimentality if it had been handled any differently. For people my age, it triggers a kind of buffer overflow that is so over-the-top in its sincerity that it short-circuits any attempt to mock it. And here, it’s perfectly selected to be funny and heartfelt at the same time, mocking and sincere, a genuine mission statement for the emotional message of the entire movie that’s also undeniably off.
Plus, it’s a wonderful idea that it’s simply in M3GAN’s nature to sing, because she’s still a toy.
My theater had sustained laughter for what felt like five minutes. And I already liked Allison Williams for being eager to take parts where she’s a villain or extremely flawed (her one glam moment in this movie is undercut by M3GAN saying, bizarrely, that she’s dolled up like “a Portuguese prostitute”); here, she dead-pans the scene so pitch-perfectly that it makes everything funnier.
Even if the rest of the movie had been terrible, that one scene would’ve knocked it out of the park for me. And the rest of the movie is kind of rough — it’s got pacing issues and is at least 20 minutes too long, it’s still implausible even after you account for its not giving a damn about being plausible, and it is shamelessly corny as hell.
But there are flashes of cleverness and originality throughout (I especially love the flashback to a 1980s toy robot) that remind us the corny stuff isn’t simply ineptitude, or a crass sequel cash-in, but an homage to action movies that were simpler and stupider. And its funniest and goofiest moments are also its most emotionally resonant, showing us how the titular villain and the actual villain of the first movie grew to understand each other and realize that they’d always been motivated by the same thing.
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