M3gan

 The name stands for 'Model 3 Generative Android'. Which is cute until you wonder what happened with the previous two models - did they call them Mwangan and Emtwogan? Also, generative? That's the sort of crap a marketing department would come up with, but the name comes from M3gan's creator, Gemma (Allison Williams) - a supposedly brilliant techie. Tsk tsk.

 M3gan is a very dumb but fun techno-thriller written by the same people behind the stellar Malignant (the gold standard for modern dumb fun scary movies) and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who did the also pretty good Housebound. It's got some satirical elements, some heightened character stuff and quite a few jokes, but somewhat surprisingly it's mostly played straight.

 Gemma works for Funki, a Seattle-based company that seems to mostly make robot toys. Bored of working on the company's biggest hit (a high tech Furby knock-off; they're a little more intelligent, and a lot more asshole), she's been working behind her boss's back on the titular M3gan, a four-foot tall humanoid robot with an embedded A.I.

 In an unrelated development, her young niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is orphaned in an ironic traffic accident, and Gemma is named her custodian. It's good that they explain that Gemma made a promise to Cady's mom to take care of her should anything happen because otherwise it'd make no sense at all; Gemma has no maternal instincts whatsoever, is uncomfortable around children, and would clearly rather not be a surrogate parent. Her lack of a clue on how to deal with Cady is mostly played for laughs (if nothing else, it's an excuse for the most passive-aggressive unboxing ever)

 So she gets the brilliant idea to give the prototype AI toy to Cady and let her bond with it. She clearly has never watched or read any sci-fi.

Doing her best to earn a spot in the Blumhouse intro.

 M3gan and Cady get on famously - enough that just seeing them together prompts Gemma's boss to do an about face Re:M3gan and promote it instantly to the company's biggest project after a demonstration to the shareholders goes down very well.

 But Gemma's starting to have second thoughts as M3gan starts showing some troublesome behaviours: subtly subverting Gemma's authority over Cady, downloading material even when it falls outside of her allotted actions, turning on when she should be off, killing the neighbour's dog, making her system files unavailable, killing the neighbour... You know, little things, but they add up.

 So in the eve of M3gan's public reveal, Gemma decides to pull the plug on the little psycho doll and go home to finally have a heart-to-heart and connect with her niece. Meanwhile, at the office, M3gan does what rogue AIs do best: escaping destruction, engaging in fun but unnecessary carnage, and tracking down the protagonists for a very crowd-pleasing final confrontation.

 Because it's a Blumhouse/Universal production, it's got a bit better production than you'd expect from a solo Blumhouse outing, with lots of extras, locations, and some pretty impressive effects for M3gan (there are a whole lot of puppeteers listed on the credits, kudos to them.) It's a PG13 movie, so don't expect much in the way of bloodshed, but it fits well with the movie's genre and unexpected restraint.

 It gets a lot of mileage from the toy's uncanny valley mannerisms and inscrutability, as expected, and some unexpected weird touches (including that dance scene spoiled in the trailers; It would have been much more effective without seeing that bit coming, but hey, guess it makes sense from a marketing point of view.) The script does try to raise some points - I liked how it compares Gemma's lack of parenting instincts to just dumping the AI on the doll and hoping it'll work things out on its own - but it's mostly a sub-Crichton screenplay that hits all the usual technophobic points and threads them into an entertaining yarn.

 Even at a lean hundred minutes it feels a little bit undernourished, padded out by a particularly dumb industrial espionage subplot that could be cut out and no one would miss it (its only justification is that it increases the body count, and dat dance scene.) Still, it does what it sets out to do while always keeps a sense of humor about itself. It may not have Malignant's batshit crazy mojo, but that's a rare, precious thing; let's not hold it against poor M3gan.

Expect a lot of M3gans next Halloween...

 Ending spoilers - The rock'em'sock'em robots sequence was superb, but I really expected Gemma to remember that first, disastrous presentation and remove the flux capacitor or whatever it was that made M2gan's head explode. A screwdriver to the CPU is fine (and it was foreshadowed when Gemma pointed it out to Cady on Bruce, which is a nice touch) but a tad unimaginative.