How do you follow up a surprise hit movie about a killer companion robot for kids? You turn the dial up to 11 with balls to the wall insanity. Which I can appreciate, as you already know that M3GAN is a bad robot, so you really can’t do a “surprise she’s evil…again” with her like they did with Chucky, as she is with the same family. So what do you do? You introduce a bigger, more evil robot!
That robot, as we find out, is named AMELIA. She was developed by the government to be the perfect espionage robot, capable of infiltrating the enemy and taking them out with extreme prejudice. However, when she kills the target she was supposed to save, the operators realize something might be wrong. Then she destroys everyone in the company who built her and disappears off the grid. But the government has an idea of where she might be going to.
Enter Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), the family who survived M3GAN’s rampage in the first one. They’re still picking up the pieces of their life. Gemma has stopped making killer robots and is working on AI regulation lobbies and trying to make helpful items that can’t possibly be used for combat, like an exosuit. Cady is at a new school and taking aikido so that she can defend herself without the need of a protector robot. But when the government comes calling to warn them about AMELIA, it appears that the smart home they are in has a bit of a secret–M3GAN is actually the OS.
Now in order to stop one killer robot, they must make a deal with another. Who will come out on top, AMELIA or M3GAN? And what does the winner intend to do with Gemma and Cady when they are done?
You have to watch because I’m not telling!
As a fan of the original, I can appreciate that they went from horror/thriller to straight up action movie for the second one. It’s a lot like THE TERMINATOR in that respect, or perhaps ALIEN, but on a smaller scale. The change-up allows them to bypass the set-up you needed in the original and get straight to the action. Sure some of the beats have been cribbed from other movies, but have they been done with killer female robots?
Allison Williams is great as the conflicted and worried Gemma, who knows that unleashing M3GAN back into the world might not be a good thing, but she doesn’t have much of a choice. Violet McGraw is great as Cady, and she gets to be a little more proactive about her destiny in this one. Her faith in M3GAN might be her undoing but she believes that even killer robots deserve a second chance. Jenna Davis is great as the voice of M3GAN, getting to be sassy and threatening even when she doesn’t have a body to carry out the threats. Then there’s Ivanna Sakhno as AMELIA, who doesn’t get to do much besides annihilate but does it well, sort of like her character in ASHOKA. We even get Jermaine Clement as a tech billionaire in a bit part that he sleazes up to the max.
Gerard Johnstone returns to direct and picks up the writing credit as well this time around and does a hell of a job. Between the M3GAN movies and HOUSEBOUND, I don’t think there’s a flick of his I haven’t liked. He knows when the movie has to take itself seriously and when to take the piss out of itself and it treads the line between them well. The two-hour runtime didn’t feel long at all as there is a lot of fun packed in there and the movie never stops going.
Not a lot of blood in this one but there doesn’t need to be. The robot effects are good and there’s a scene later on where M3GAN looks particularly horrifying in a cool way. AMELIA gets a cool outfit halfway through that makes her look like something from Silverhawks or a Cylon and I am here for it. There are a lot of neat robot effects that we really don’t see anymore that gave the whole thing and appropriately old-school vibe. Some of the gags are simple to pull off but damnit, they work.
Honestly, everything has a real 90s direct to video vibe about it and I mean that in the best way. It’s the kind of movie you would have picked up off the shelf on a lark and been blown away by it and I’m glad it got made. You can tell it was made by people who love the concept and wanted to do something different than just retread the original and they knocked it out of the park. I’m not sure where they go with the franchise from here but I’m down for wherever they want to go.
Check it out.
