Director: Gerard Johnstone
Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Ivanna Sakhno, Aristotle Athari, Timm Sharp, Jemaine Clement
Screenplay: Gerard Johnstone
120 mins. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material, and brief drug references.

The original M3GAN was an unqualified success, and nobody saw it coming. A PG-13 horror-comedy take on the killer doll trope with a critique of AI? Turns out, it worked. The movie brought in more than respectable viewership, especially releasing wide in January, still thought by some to be a death month for movies, and more than that, it was a lot of fun. Fast forward to 2025, and Blumhouse/Atomic Monster has moved forward with a sequel, a very self-aware film that embraces some of the dumber elements, brings a bigger scope, shifts tones, and works pretty well as a sci-fi/comedy follow-up that dares to be different.

Two years after destroying M3GAN, Gemma (Allison Williams, Get Out) has become an outspoken advocate for regulating AI, and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw, Thunderbolts*) has embraced her newfound confidence, but the two are them are still keeping secrets from each other. Case in point: Gemma has just learned that M3GAN is still “alive,” her consciousness floating through the tech of Gemma’s apartment. Meanwhile, a military asset called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, Pacific Rim: Uprising), built using tech derived from M3GAN, has become self-aware and wants an AI takeover. Now, Gemma, Cady, and friends must team up with M3GAN to put a stop to AMELIA, but can they even trust the killer doll?

M3GAN 2.0 swaps up tones and genres from its predecessor in a fairly effective way, very similar to how Happy Death Day, a horror comedy, is followed up by Happy Death Day 2U, which leaned into the sci-fi elements far more. It’s a natural progression for both franchises, and it allows M3GAN 2.0 to feel fresh, exploring new avenues for its characters rather than just a repeat of the previous film. That’s where M3GAN 2.0 really shines. It’s self-aware of some of the more popular elements of the first movie, but it isn’t reliant on a “greatest hits” compilation. When it calls back to the original, it feels organically so. Director Gerard Johnstone (Housebound), returning from the first film and taking on a screenwriter credit for the sequel, is moving the story forward and creating some genuinely impressive character turns that were expected but also handled incredibly well. Going in, I wondered if Johnstone could make the dynamic between Gemma and M3GAN evolve the way the trailers seemed to indicate, but Johnstone’s clever directing choices worked surprisingly well in the finished film.

Now, this M3GAN sequel is almost as good as the original but make no mistakes: it’s an incredibly stupid movie, but that’s kind of what it’s going for. This is clearly another genre picture made by people that grew up with the wild and wacky horror of the 1980s, taking a B-horror picture and making it with an A-horror production, and let’s be clear: stupid does not equate to bad. Johnstone finds the right tone for the silliness that makes it incredibly watchable, but if you’re looking for more serious horror, you’ll likely find that M3GAN 2.0 has pushed past what little seriousness the original had. Its humor is more over-the-top as its plot becomes more and more ludicrous.

M3GAN 2.0 has some difficulty in its action set pieces. There are a lot of moments of robot-punching-robot and the like, and very little of it feels exciting. It’s science fiction ideas and comedic moments are stronger than its lacking action, and when the action beats occur, they bring the narrative momentum to a halt, which is a problem because M3GAN 2.0 has some bloated pacing issues as well.

It also suffers from the same glaring fault of its predecessor: its rating. No, there isn’t anything wrong with PG-13 horror, but there are instances of films that need an R and ones that don’t. I feel like M3GAN is begging for an R rating, and these PG-13 films feels stylistically neutered, as if they were shot for an R and the studio got nervous and trimmed out all of the violent bits in favor of pleasing a younger audience that, quite honestly, have already seen the Deadpool films by this point.

M3GAN 2.0 is an entertaining and quirky follow-up to the original that makes some interesting tonal shifts and embraces a lot of the goofier elements of its premise, with a well-made character arc for its killer doll. While it lacks some energy in its action, its run time, and its rating, M3GAN 2.0 swings for the fences and hits far more than it misses. This has become a fascinating and delightfully sassy little franchise than I’d be more than happy to see where it goes next.

3/5
-Kyle A. Goethe