M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

When M3GAN (2022) hit screens, it came with the production stamp of filmmaker James Wan; but while he neither wrote nor directed it, the film was nevertheless in the style of his post-Saw (2004) semi-pastiches, using genre tropes to tell stories in a modern context. His previous work of this type includes Dead Silence (2007), about an evil puppet, and the paranormal franchises that spawned from Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013), and Malignant (2021), which in a way was the culmination of his ploughing this particular furrow.

I have mixed feelings about Wan’s niche. He’s good at producing glossy and populist horror entertainment, but a work like Malignant, for instance—while fun as a gonzo bad-taste reply to Frank Henenlotter’s exploitation classic Basket Case (1982)—also missed the point of that film and its humanistic message. It instead inadvertently (one hopes) expresses the idea that abnormal people should be hated, feared, and destroyed.

And it’s not the only film from Wan’s stable that feels sloppy in its scripting and communicates bad messages. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) was derived from a real murder case where the defence infamously invoked demonic possession. The movie is also, like all of The Conjuring series, based on the awful Ed and Lorraine Warren, both now deceased, who were “paranormal investigators”/con merchants. It’s just entertainment, sure, but born of real human suffering from an era when hysteria about Satanism caused immense miscarriages of justice, and thus arguably shouldn’t be thrust so undisguised into the mainstream for profit.

Into this context walked M3GAN, a cross between the “evil little girl”, “haunted doll”, and sci-fi “future shock” tropes/genres. Written by Malignant scribe Akela Cooper, it emerged under the direction of Gerard Johnstone as a simple Black Mirror-esque tale about a scientist (Allison Williams) who makes a robot companion called M3GAN (voiced by Jenna Davis, performed by Amie Donald) for her orphaned niece (Violet McGraw) that, in the way of such things, becomes a stalker-ish killer.

The film didn’t have the satirical chops to distinguish itself and was relatively light on meme content, the apex of which (e.g., M3GAN doing a funny dance with a laser-printer blade) being used in the trailer as enticement. I liked the movie overall, though I still remember my bitter disappointment when it seemed to be amping up to a large-scale climax with M3GAN killing her way through an office tower, only to cut to a much more frugal final confrontation in a suburban garage.

This sequel brings back the scientist and her pint-sized project, still determined by her programming to protect Gemma’s niece, Cady. (The same actresses return for these three central roles.) A new version of the same technology—another fem-bot, this one known as AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), which stands for ‘Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics & Infiltration Android’—is being used by the military to perform covert operations. But she goes rogue in the Middle East and kills a scientist before deciding to track down and kill anyone connected with her development, at which point the FBI realises that someone, or something, programmed her to do this for their own mysterious ends.

In the interim, Gemma’s become an A.I. sceptic and activist for less technological domination of children’s lives. As AMELIA’s mission puts Cady at risk, however, she’s forced to very grudgingly team up with M3GAN, whose spirit has returned from the ether (or persona from the cloud, however you define it) to fulfil its prime directive and protect the child.

M3GAN 2.0 is a fun action yarn and a clear improvement over its predecessor, which is rare for a sequel to achieve. It’s been observed that M3GAN 2.0 is to the original what Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was to The Terminator (1984)—a less horror-oriented, more epic vision of the same story, with the antagonist recast as one of the heroes up against a deadlier version of itself. This sequel also adds to its original a more interesting satirical commentary on A.I. and the interplay between machine and creator, with great fight scenes.

It isn’t anything like as good as James Cameron’s T2, of course. For all its invocation of the A.I.-induced apocalypse, its action doesn’t have the same tactility and rollicking suspense as in Cameron’s masterpiece. And nothing in M3GAN 2.0 has the Biblical force of T2’s imagery and storyline, like the shot of Linda Hamilton burning away to a skeleton outside a Los Angeles playground, the landscape drenched in nuclear fire.

What M3GAN 2.0 achieves instead is, again, a level of glossy and populist entertainment common to Wan-produced films, although this time director Johnstone takes on the writing duties too. His screenplay is obviously structured, with easy setups and payoffs. Savvy audiences will know what cybersecurity expert and Gemma’s love interest Christian’s (Aristotle Athari) arc will be almost before the character’s introduced. The film remains engaging, though, through a well-crafted mix of humour and archetype work.

The meme content is also upped, although I missed a big hairy man from the trailer calling M3GAN a “smoking-hot warrior princess” among a crowd of fans. Maybe he appeared when I popped out for the loo, or in a post-credits scene. (Or maybe someone made the decision that an adult man describing a canonically preteen girl as “smoking hot” was just about okay for a trailer, but a bit Jimmy Savile for the actual film, even if she is a fantasy robot.)

It ultimately seems as though the sequel allowed Johnstone to unlock the shackles attached by Blumhouse Productions’ formulas and be more eccentric in the particulars, while still relying on a predictable structure as a stabiliser, almost. It’s sometimes the case that sequels improve on their predecessors through being freed up by the latter’s success, to expand on those elements a studio would previously have held in check—for lowest common denominator and budgetary reasons, a la the humour but also the scale of the action scenes.

While it wasn’t The Raid (2011)-style slaughter-fest that I was hoping for from the original, and though it does end up concluding in another enclosed space, the stakes feel higher and the spaces larger this go around. This is partly because there are more variations on the types of fights happening. M3GAN was restricted to a succession of deaths carried out by the robot before a standard-issue final boss fight between it, Gemma, and Cady. In M3GAN 2.0 , we get robot brawls between M3GAN and AMELIA, a neurally linked and mech-suited Gemma, various goons, and so on.

The acting is uniformly competent and effective from Williams and Davis as M3GAN. The latter has a sassy and sparky persona here, which plays well against Williams’ convincing portrayal of a conflicted scientist-cum-surrogate mother. I’m generally not a fan of “genius child” characters in genre films, but McGraw isn’t bad as Cady. Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps return as Cole and Tess, respectively, Gemma’s long-suffering team. Ultimately, M3GAN is a poppy and sardonic sci-fi action movie that’s worth the ticket price if you like this breed of silly genre fiction exercise.

USA • CANADA • NEW ZEALAND | 2025 | 120 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Gerard Johnstone.
writer: Gerard Johnstone (story by Gerard Johnstone & Akela Cooper).
starring: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ivanna Sakhno, Jemaine Clement, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis (voice), Brian Jordan Alvarez, Aristotle Athari & Timm Sharp.