Blumhouse, who’s known for delivering horror hits, found a potential golden goose back in 2022 with M3GAN. Through the hilarity and oddly terrifying nature of its titular antagonist, the film became not only a box-office success, but also cemented itself as a true modern slasher. Unfortunately, the next iteration, M3GAN 2.0 is a rare instance of defying expectations being a bad thing as it almost completely sheds its horror identity for comedic action thrills no one asked for. 

M3GAN 2.0 could’ve easily been a run of the mill follow-up where M3GAN somehow resurrects herself to exact revenge against her creator Gemma (Allison Williams) and niece Katie (Violet McGraw). However, it goes in a different direction that sees Gemma and Katie regrettably work with M3GAN to take down another AI android named AMELIA (Ivana Sakhno) before she kills them. It’s a fairly bizarre turn that, on paper, still could provide some good chances for horror – but rarely does. M3GAN 2.0 instead leans harder into the snarky comedy and some new action elements that don’t suit it well. 

Action is not where this franchise or its characters should’ve gone because it’s too low budget to do anything inventive or interesting. Gerard Johnstone looks out of his comfort zone directing these more action-packed sequences of M3GAN taking on an army of soldiers or AMELIA in hand-to-hand combat. The fighting looks slow and doesn’t feature the brutality or bloodshed to leave anything more than a blunt impact. Frankly, the film, as a whole, is pretty bloodless outside of a few moments and more cuts or damage could’ve easily given the action a much-needed horror aesthetic. Admittedly, it is pretty cool to see M3GAN sustain gnarly damage but keep fighting anyway, and it is nice how Johnstone plays with brutality for characters like M3GAN and AMELIA, especially since they’re not human and basically free game. But, in general, M3GAN 2.0’s shift into action isn’t worthwhile and the elements of spy movies thrown in, like her slyly gliding into an enemy facility with a wingsuit, are just as generic-feeling. 

The comedy also takes a massive hit as M3GAN 2.0 cranks up the jokes and snark of the humor far too much – almost to excessively cringy levels. The first film was funny in well-placed doses, knowing how to add some levity or weird fun to M3GAN destroying anyone who got in her way. Here though, every opportunity is taken to give M3GAN some unwarranted one-liner or splice in some comedic beat that tanks the tone. There’s one scene, in particular, where M3GAN just randomly starts singing “This Woman’s Work” to Gemma and it’s remarkably awkward. It’s like the film is obsessively trying to create memes with M3GAN in the middle of the movie, and it makes a lot of comedic shifts forced and fall completely flat. Even human characters like Gemma and Katie come off too jokey to be taken seriously, which greatly impedes the film’s ability to tell a decent or even cohesive story. 

With M3GAN 2.0 trying to balance a ton of genres, ideas, characters, and more all at once, it comes off like an incoherent mess. It’s basically throwing a lot of ideas at the wall, including new enemy tech companies or some of the science behind these AI androids, with none of them sticking or standing out. And, worst of all, it comes at the cost of the pacing, which is very sluggish through a final act that never seems to want to end, as well as the characters the first film made us care about. Overall, no one is performing bad, especially M3GAN. It’s still impressive to see Amie Donald and Jenna Davis provide the physical and voice performance, respectively, to bring M3GAN to life. Their work continues to build an iconic modern horror killer that fans will still love, even in a shoddy sequel like this. Unfortunately, the material they are given isn’t strong or focused enough to give them room to work. 

Any time there’s a moment where the film lets M3GAN and Gemma confront their past issues, it’s rudely interrupted by a joke that rips away the seriousness of what’s happening. These characters have almost no arcs at all, even M3GAN barely has one, and there’s no emotional beats worth clinging onto. Even the new threats this film provides in AMELIA or a “surprise” villain that appears are terribly surface-level and thin. There’s absolutely nothing interesting about them and it deeply hinders their ability to create any sort of suspense or scares. Frankly, that’s the film’s biggest problem of all, that it totally steers clear of horror while still trying to act like it’s a part of that genre. It’s weird to say this with a horror film, but M3GAN 2.0 is completely devoid of scares and it’s sad to see M3GAN lose any sort of scare factor she had. 

M3GAN 2.0 is exactly what happens when you overthink the follow-up and lose the plot in the process. In an attempt to be more crowd-pleasing through harder dips into comedy and injecting sci-fi action into the mix, M3GAN 2.0 loses its identity as a potential horror hit and ends up being a sequel that rarely does anything right.

Watch the Trailer Here: