M3GAN 2.0 (2025) – She’ll Be Back

Released: 26th July
Seen: 8th October

In 2023, the world was introduced to a dancing robot who killed people and her name was M3GAN. It’s kind of wild how much of a global phenomenon this little doll became, but she was everywhere. She pretty much instantly gained icon status and became a camp superstar; people dressed like her for Halloween, and everyone was excited for more adventures with this murderbot. All this is especially surprising when you consider that M3GAN was released in January, which is notorious for being a dumping ground for movies, particularly those in the horror genre. It was such a great film that I put it at number 7 on my Best list that year, and I’m not the only one who put it up on that pedestal. M3GAN was pretty much guaranteed a sequel the second opening weekend finished, and now 2 years later, M3GAN 2.0 has graced us with its presence, and while I’m not going to pretend it’s bad, it’s certainly nothing like I expected.

M3GAN 2.0 picks up a few years after the events of the first movie, with Gemma (Allison Williams) now using her name to advocate for AI regulation while continuing to raise her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). Meanwhile, the government is using a prototype doll named AMELIA to go off and do missions for them, but AMELIA quickly gains sentience and goes off to do her own evil, clandestine mission, which naturally leads the government to look into Gemma since AMELIA’s programming is remarkably similar to M3GAN’s. Through some convoluted excuses that don’t matter, M3GAN is still alive and eventually put back into a copy of her old body by Gemma so that they can work together to stop AMELIA before AMELIA does something to end the world and worst of all, possibly hurt Cady.

So, you might have noticed from that brief plot description and the trailer that we’re not really talking about a horror film anymore. M3GAN 2.0 has instead decided to take the Terminator 2 route and make an action film where the main robot we know from the last movie is the hero instead of the unrepentant murder machine. In theory, this is an interesting way to take the franchise. After all, when Terminator did it, we ended up getting one of the greatest action films in the history of cinema, so really, there isn’t a better franchise to copy from than that one. The problem is that Terminator 2 ended up being one of the best action films of all time, and so therefore no one really cares that it was such a genre switch from the original; we ended up getting an upgrade… M3GAN 2.0 is not such a dramatic upgrade that it makes you forget what this franchise used to be: campy slasher fun for the whole family.

To give M3GAN 2.0 its due credit, it is still a fun film that really hits that sweet spot of campy fun on occasion that the first film did. There’s an undeniable sense of fun with this whole film; every choice is the right choice to make for an enjoyable moment that you can’t help but smile about when it’s happening. The action scenes are just perfectly set up to be as big and silly as you could hope for, including a big scene at a conference that allowed M3GAN the chance to dance, which is certainly fun, albeit less so than it was when she did it in the last movie. It also helps that this film is using its story to really take a few potshots at AI and those who try to convince us it’s the future and we have to give in to it (which right now apparently includes the man running the company that made this film who you’d think might’ve seen his own movie that calls AI a bunch of fucking bullshit); that’s a fun choice that leads to some fun interactions. The keyword that this film operates on at all times is ‘fun’, and that’s great… but it’s nowhere near as much fun as the film before it was.

What made M3GAN so special was that the horror element allowed for some truly dark moments among the comic ones. M3GAN’s dance from the original became so instantly iconic because it was such a cheesy dance immediately followed by her grabbing the blade from a paper cutter and doing a brutal murder. There was a wild and over the top contrast that made it exciting… that contrast isn’t so over the top here, M3GAN might do a version of her dancing thing but it’s as a distraction in a scene where she’s meant to be sneaking into somewhere because that was the only place where they could come up with an excuse for her to dance. Same with a lot of the other weird things that M3GAN did that were creepy in the original. Here, versions of those things are done almost out of obligation to repeat things we saw last time, but with a completely different context that removes some of the effectiveness.

The sharp change in genre really does kind of hurt this film because you can feel them forcing a horror character to behave like an action heroine in a way that’s unnatural. They force M3GAN to be unable to kill people because they need her to be the hero of the film, despite that opening up questions of “Why didn’t you do this in the last movie?”. Any violence done must only be in self-defence or at least be justifiable. No kids getting harmed, no animals, just faceless goons who we don’t mind seeing hurt. Moments that the last film used to be genuinely unnerving (M3GAN’s running like a crazed animal, for example) are used here as a comedic beat. There are no scares here and while that is clearly intentional because they’ve shifted genres, M3GAN just isn’t the kind of character that works in this new genre. Certainly not as well as she did as a horror character, this is like if they took Chucky and made him into an action hero… sure, I could see them doing it and I could even see it being fun, but it would feel wrong.

M3GAN 2.0 is an update to the franchise that keeps a fair chunk of the fun but loses a lot of the charm. It’s not a bad movie by any standard, indeed if you somehow didn’t know the original film I could see this being a good time but if you know and liked the original M3GAN, then you’re left with a film that’s fun to watch but feels hollow. It lacks the magic that made the original M3GAN a cultural phenomenon, choosing instead to try and make her even more palatable for a mainstream audience by removing her bloodlust which ended up just removing what made her special. It’s fine, but it would’ve been so much better if it were a goddamn horror movie like the original was.