• Director: Gerard Johnstone
• Screenplay: Gerard Johnstone
• Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Ivanna Sakhno, Jemaine Clement
• Cinematography: Toby Oliver
• Score: Chris Bacon
• Genre: Science fiction action
• Runtime: 120 minutes

Hold on to your vaginas!

To completely misquote Harvey Dent’s line from ‘The Dark Knight’: “you either die a villain, or live long enough to see yourself become the hero.” In this case, closer to an anti-hero.

Two years after the chaos that was ‘M3GAN‘, Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) find themselves under threat from ‘AMELIA’ (autonomous military engagement logistics and infiltration android), a rogue AI housed in a humanoid adult body. AMELIA is on the hunt for everyone involved in her creation and since she’s been coded with M3GAN’s data, Gemma has no real choice but to reassemble the latter from the scrapheap to save the day. The robotic doll’s request: make her taller, accommodating the fact that the child actress portraying M3GAN’s physical form has grown a foot or so.

‘M3GAN 2.0‘ eschews the horror aspects that made the first film a hit in favour of an all-out action escapade. M3GAN was a convincingly creepy doll but her devolution into one of the ‘good guys’ undoes the effort of the original. Her uncanny valley features used to be menacing, not anymore; she’s now reduced to spouting sarky quips.

It’s serviceable as a story – more or less. I can get on board with the message that ‘AI is bad’ but it’s hammered home to the point of exhaustion. The dialogue isn’t user-friendly; there’s a load of technobabble flying from every corner which just sounds like white noise to me. I think there’s a bug in the system – let’s press Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

My rating: 5 / 10