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*½/**** starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Jemaine Clement written and directed by Gerald Johnstone
by Walter Chaw Gerald Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 feels like one of those 1980s teensploitation sci-fi adventure flicks. D.A.R.Y.L., for instance–D.A.R.Y.L. exactly, let’s face it. Given that D.A.R.Y.L. hardly set the world on fire, this does not bode well for M3GAN 2.0. To its credit, it takes a wild swing at relevance, M3GAN 2.0 does, in a way that’s at complete odds with what drove the first film’s safe swing at relevance, pushing this sequel into Spies Like Us/Volunteers territory. Or Best Defense, why not? All those musty Cold War artifacts of the Reagan era that looked for humor in entrenched doomsday scenarios; closed-system satires that don’t have much to say because there’s no way out–that don’t have much room to satirize anything because you can’t make the “stupid Apocalypse” any stupider than the idiots heralding it have already made it. M3GAN 2.0 plays a lot like a Naked Gun prologue, in fact, one that opens with a spybot assassinating a brown baddie in a ridiculous stalking and ends in a bump-off that’s just a little too violent to be horrible. It’s a joke everyone’s in on, told with an arched eyebrow and a whiff of “the call is coming from inside the house,” The Matrix Resurrections-style. This is payback for all the notes. This is payback for thinking this is a franchise.
Seems the tech for the best-friend-bot from the original has been acquired by the military-industrial complex and repurposed as an assassin-bot they’ve put into action. This new creation, dubbed AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, effectively reprising her role from The Spy Who Dumped Me) and looking like a travel-sized Elizabeth Olsen, promptly goes rogue, necessitating the intervention of M3GAN creator Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece, M3GAN’s old pal Cady (Violet McGraw), who alone (apparently) has the ability upload M3GAN’s consciousness into another bot so that the two murderbots can Thunderdome it out. Idiotic? Idiotic doesn’t begin to describe it, certainly not how flat the one-liners are, how exhausted M3GAN’s bitchy, McKayla Maroney expressions are, how ill-advised is Jemaine Clement’s role as a tech billionaire who’s turned himself into a cyborg bodybuilder. Yes, Clement is Alton Appleton (why not Facey Facebookingham or Amal Amazonstein?), who has a neural implant or three, making him a target for AMELIA because… Forget it. Whatever the hot-button resonances of the plot, none of it matters. It so deeply doesn’t matter that I feel superstitious bringing it up.
Gemma preaches the dangers of AI, leery of the technology after having witnessed her first attempt to skirt adult responsibility (i.e., M3GAN 1.0) murder a bunch of children, while Cady learns aikido for the sole purpose of one joke (about a series of Steven Seagal movie titles) and one action (Cady breaking free from an assailant). Gemma resurrects M3GAN, of course, for the cause of good, and M3GAN assures her that she has undergone some real personal growth and deserves this shot at becoming James Bond. Or “JANE” Bond. Get it? Man, that’s rich. There’s a cameo from the Microsoft Word paperclip, and Jenna Davis returns as the voice of M3GAN, precisely capturing every teen snot bully from every high-school comedy. Not to mention the government spooks, the digital countdowns, the slapstick gags that recall the kid espionage thriller Cloak & Dagger, and the faint whiff of Russian honeypot shenanigans, which brings to mind Terminator 3‘s immediately deflated promise of auto-inflating cleavage. The promise, that is, not the cleavage–but the cleavage, too, I guess. Hey, have you guys seen Eve of Destruction? The one with Renée Soutendijk of Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man and Spetters? That one’s pretty good and maintains its concept, this concept, all the way through, to the point where I think the robot even has a flash of maternal love. Could I be misremembering that? There’s no way that’s how that movie ends, is there? Well, I guess I have my afternoon squared away. Sorry, what the fuck were we talking about? Whozindawhatnow? We were? M3GAN 2.0? Stop it, what the fuck is that?
