‘M3GAN 2.0’ Review: More Sci-fi Comedy Than Horror

M3GAN 2.0 Review
M3GAN 2.0 Review
M3gan and Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno) in ‘M3GAN 2.0’ (Photo © 2025 Universal Studios)

Artificial intelligence was a big current events deal when the first M3GAN movie came out a few years back. But AI technology has moved in leaps and bounds since then, and the movie franchise had to keep up. Enter M3GAN 2.0.

M3GAN 2.0 picks up a couple of years after the events of M3GAN with toy developer Gemma Forrester (Get Out’s Allison Williams) still living with her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw from Thunderbolts*), and running her own “socially conscious” tech company. When the government uses a variation of Gemma’s M3GAN technology to create a robotic AI weapon called AMELIA, they have the same results that Gemma did when the tech was used as a toy – the robot eventually turns sentient and goes berserk. Knowing the nuts and bolts of the programming, Gemma is the only one who can stop AMELIA. And she turns to a familiar source for help – her original M3GAN prototype.

The band that made M3GAN is back together with M3GAN 2.0. Writer/director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper are both back. Besides Williams and McGraw, Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps are back as Gemma’s loyal-yet-underappreciated teammates. Even Jenna Davis and Amie Donald are back as M3GAN’s voice and body, respectively. There are some new faces – Jemaine Clement as a tech billionaire, Aristotle Athari as Gemma’s boyfriend, Ivanna Sakhno as AMELIA – but for the most part, it’s clear that this is a M3GAN movie, both behind and in front of the camera.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s a knock-off or a rehash. M3GAN 2.0 feels a bit like what Terminator 2: Judgement Day was after The Terminator. The villain from the first film comes back in a hero role to save the day in the second. There are plenty of shades of grey to it, and everyone, especially Gemma, is suspicious of M3GAN’s motives, but what it comes down to is M3GAN is, and always has been, in it to protect Cady, and if that shifts her from antagonist to protagonist, so be it. It’s in her programming, after all.

The issue that fans of M3GAN may have with M3GAN 2.0 is that it’s more of a sci-fi comedy than a horror movie. There’s also plenty of action, and, of course, some dancing, but very little horror. It’s a tonal shift from the first movie that only partially works. Part of what made M3GAN so effective was the uncanny valley concept of M3GAN looking almost human, but not quite. AMELIA looks completely human, so she just seems like a heartless killer. Which she is. But that steers M3GAN 2.0 into being more of a Terminator-type thing than a Child’s Play-type thing.

Once M3GAN gains Gemma’s trust enough to put her programming back into her old body, the uncanny valley is back, but it’s almost humorous at that point. AMELIA is a much more convincing android. And speaking of humorous, the body that Gemma first puts M3GAN into is hysterical, and M3GAN’s reaction to it is equally hysterical.

So, with M3GAN 2.0, the stakes are higher. It’s more about saving the world than saving a little girl. And with that shift, the movie slips into stereotypical action territory, feeling almost like a Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal movie (the latter of which is Cady’s role model for self-defense). Once it hits the third act, the narrative gets a bit clogged up. There are a few too many red herrings and false flags. Some are fun surprises, but most are unnecessary diversions that, frankly, add about 15 minutes or so on to what could be a nice, compact little science fiction action film.

Speaking of science fiction, some of the tech in M3GAN 2.0 is more fiction than science. Most of it seems far-fetched, but it also feels like the kind of movie that people will look back on and think that it’s primitive. Of course, the real techy stuff will age like Hackers, but there are some interesting concepts presented, like strength-assisting exoskeletons and neural implants, that may be possible in the near (or not too near) future. And that may make M3GAN 2.0 fun to revisit in 10 or 20 years.

M3GAN 2.0 also brings up a lot of ethical questions about AI. Gemma’s new mission in life is “responsible AI,” so the conundrums about the technology are front and center in the movie – when to use it, when not to, should it be militarized or privatized, how big of an invasion of privacy it is, how much power does (and should) it hold? There are no real answers, but the questions are interesting. There’s a lot of tech philosophy wrapped up in this crazy little story about fighting robots.

And that technobabble is probably the scariest thing about M3GAN 2.0. It’s not the movie itself, but the future it predicts. And considering other parts of the movie are ripped from the headlines (it seems to have predicted an Israel-Iran conflict), that future is terrifying. But M3GAN 2.0 itself is not.

GRADE: C+

Rating: PG-13 for sexual material, brief drug references, bloody images, some strong language, and strong violent content
Release Date: June 27, 2025
Running Time: 1 hour 59 minutes
Studio: Universal Pictures




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