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I enjoyed the first M3GAN but I couldn’t work out if it was a parody of a corny psycho robot doll movie or just a corny psycho robot doll movie. There is no confusion with where they are coming from with this sequel though. They seem a lot more sure of what they are making and a result so do we. M3GAN 2.0 is a confident action comedy. It certainly isn’t a horror film which seems to have given online commenters something to gripe about but the original wasn’t very tense or scary either so better that they’ve dropped any genre pretence. 

If I’m honest, M3GAN 2.0 is not very sophisticated and it is not at all surprising but it is funny and it is entertaining, it is even occasionally quite clever, so it delivers exactly what it promises. I wouldn’t have rushed to this but the marketing was so bold and out there that I was drawn in. The tag line for this movie about M3GAN being reconstructed to fight a more sophisticated female battlebot is ‘This bitch verses that bitch’, and you kind of have to respect the honesty and simplicity of something like that. It also featured the line ‘hold on to your vaginas’ as the action kicks off at one point and I think there is a feminist sentiment in there somewhere. (It works better in the context of the full film.) 

It is true that there is no shortage of killer female robots in cinema, it is a notion that has been explored with great success at one end of the scale (see Ex Machina) and with great cliche at the other (see the 1980 movie Galaxina – actually don’t), with some mockery in between (Austin Powers). This movie happily owns the cliches and the trope of ramping up the sexuality of these lady androids is definitely a part of what goes on here too. The new robot AMELIA (it stands for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android) most certainly uses her body and looks as part of her arsenal. MEGAN herself has never been sexualised, built as she was initially as a child’s toy (her name stands for Model 3 Generative Android but surely this one is model 4). This said, while she is still not really womanly she has grown up with Amie Donald, the actor playing her, herself having got taller. M3GAN is not a small child anymore and they’ve gently leaned into this. There’s a little bit of new teenage sass in her stance and demeanour, as well as in her dance moves. 

The narrative of this film is fairly incidental but there are some nice ideas in it. M3GAN actually exists in several different forms in the story as her mind is uploaded into various places and bodies and they have fun with this. The action and fights are well choreographed too and returning ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ Alison Williams and Violet McGraw are not sidelined for the title character. There is also one brief musical moment which is almost worth the price of admission by itself. 

M3GAN 2.0 is no masterwork then (it has had comparisons to Terminator 2 that it absolutely does not earn despite some shared plot points) but I had a good time with it. If you didn’t like the first one then there is nothing here to change your mind but if you found it quite fun but wanted a bit more assurance in the concept then this delivers.