Enshittification: "M3GAN 2.0"

The first M3GAN - written by Akela Cooper and James Wan, directed by Gerard Johnstone - was released in January 2023 as Blumhouse's official alternative to the season's po-faced awards bait. The tale of a sociopathically sassy emotional support android, it didn't strictly have to be any good to stand out, but it achieved one of the 21st century studio movie's aims in becoming memeable, resulting in a global box-office take of $180m. Sequel M3GAN 2.0, written and directed by Johnstone, is opening at the height of movie summer - between the new Jerry Bruckheimer and the latest Jurassic Park reboot - which possibly explains the decision to expand a small, snarkily satirical sci-fi proposition into something approximating a midrange action pic adjacent to the Terminator, X-Men and Mission: Impossible franchises. Now there is a second item of killer kit on the loose: a robot known as Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), who threatens not just one household, but the entire world order, and prompts the authorities to revive the first film's antagonist as a first line of defence. Johnstone clearly sees this as an opportunity to initiate a popcorn-counter debate about tech that goes beyond kids and screens to consider the looming presence of AI in our homes and pockets and whether it's still possible to forge an ethical career in tech, given the money and lunatics now flooding that field. All valid points for a broadsheet editorial, but as a movie, M3GAN 2.0 proves disappointingly dry: for an hour or so, there's barely one laugh to be had with it. Partly that's because Johnstone gives himself a lot more to set up: while humanoid heroine Gemma (Allison Williams) comes to realise she has to reboot the killer doll that terrorised her family, we're introduced to a weirdo tech guru (Jemaine Clement) with a neural link and bolt-on abs. The elevated budget, too, provides a lot more tech to show off, but it's a narrative issue when these gleaming machines seem to exert greater control over the plot than the tagalong humans. M3GAN 2.0 is busy, but it's never as funny as its predecessor: you begin to wonder whether everybody involved has misunderstood what made the original such a hit - and misjudged whether the franchise really needed expanding in this way.

In its second half - with M3GAN (Jenna Davis) fully rebooted - the movie shuffles closer to what one might expect from any M3GAN sequel. Williams deals with the elevated exposition as well as anybody could, and is rewarded for her efforts with a fight sequence of her own; this setpiece kicks loose the sequel's single most promising idea - having Gemma and M3GAN merge personalities, requiring Williams to mimic the robot's speech patterns - and then promptly forgets all about it. A leftfield deployment of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" is the one scene that connects to the joshing original, but plays as incongruous in this new, straitlaced context: a bug or glitch. Elsewhere, Johnstone doubles down on the original's limitations: there are too many bland supporting characters played by cutprice performers (one of whom, TV breakout Brian Jordan Alvarez, arrives on the big screen with a blotted copybook, further adding to the sense of an ill-fated production) and it's been shot with an eye to the softest of R ratings - maybe even a PG-13 - which means it keeps having to cut away from the worst of the carnage this set-up anticipates. It's as if the filter Gemma installs to rein in M3GAN's worst excesses of word and deed has equally been fitted to the film itself: the plot may take a note from Terminator 2, retrofitting an erstwhile murderbot with a conscience, but the tone recalls something like the Short Circuit sequel, particularly around the relationship between the first film's now teenage lead (Violet McGraw) and the android who once watched over her. (Again, to a M3GAN movie's detriment, I was reminded of Blumhouse's underseen Upgrade, a properly thumping, often jolting techno-fantasy that was far more vivid in its pulp, and hadn't been childproofed for an assumed audience of excitable TikTokkers.) Were it not for the visibly higher budget, M3GAN 2.0 would seem much like an opportunistic DTV riff on some sizeable studio hit: most of the ideas with which Johnstone fills these two hours have been done to death, right through to a finale that sees our heroes fleeing a lair their tech loon nemesis has equipped with self-destruct software. It is, however, very much reflective of developments in 21st century tech: after a successful first rollout, 2.0 adds a lot more whistles and bells, new toys with new buttons to press, all of which impede it from functioning as effectively as this technology once did.

M3GAN 2.0 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.