M3gan was a lean, very 90's throwback PG-13 techno thriller. Director Gerard Johnstone and scriptwriter Akela Cooper set out to sequelize it almost immediately, and their new story (Johnstone has sole scriptwriter credit) leant bigger, louder, dumber at every turn. The result is a two-hour monstrosity that leans closer to one of the latter Mission: Impossible franchise installment than to M3gan, an action-comedy that unfortunately indulges in all the worst trends of modern blockbuster scriptwriting.
The plot rather cleverly threads two separate loose ends from the first movie - an unnecessary industrial espionage subplot, and the implication that M3gan (still embodied by Amie Donald and a boatload of special FX) had uploaded itself to the cloud. The industrial espionage has resulted in Amelia (Ivana Sakhno), a M3gan clone out in the wild, doing black ops for the US government. She goes rogue almost immediately in the prologue (handily setting up the film's action aspirations), then starts making her way back to the US, murdering everyone involved with M3gan's creation on the way.
Cue the re-introduction of M3gan's creator Gemma (Alison Williams) and her niece/surrogate daughter Cady (Violet McGraw), who enjoy a somewhat closer relationship, still fraught due to Gemma's tendency to put work over her personal life.
After a seriously ridiculous act of government overreach that sets the tone of just how stupid things will get later on, M3gan reaches out to Gemma and they form a sort of alliance to defend Cady against the new android that's hunting them all. Later on, they discover that of course the whole world hangs on the balance.
The script for this thing is seriously overcomplicated, contrived, and dumb as all hell. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except that it's the sort of plot that sucks the air out of everything else, making characters into puppets and driving them to make all sorts of stupid choices to line up all the pieces. And to comply with the modern blockbuster feel it also includes several mandated, very fake-feeling emotional beats to try and give it an approximation of a soul.
Luckily it doesn't take itself very seriously. The comedy is not all that great, but the script retains a sharp ear for M3gan's ironic detachment (and Jenna Davis still hits it out of the park with her delivery). The original film's campiness also makes a comeback, predictably amped up - expect an expanded dance sequence, fabulous new outfits, and another song. On the plus side, there are a surprising amount of Steven Segal references in the finale, up to and including a very familiar-looking arm-break.
Oh, and Jemaine Clement pops up as an amoral tech bro, and his performance is a joy to behold. I love it when you can see an actor clearly having a blast.
There are quite a few action scenes, most of them with decent-to-great choreography. Unfortunately the action filmmaking is not nearly up to the task of capturing it properly, with piss-poor editing and blocking - there are several points where some of the moves seem to be edited out of sequence, or are at least poorly set up enough to be a bit disconcerting. There are some cool superpowered manoeuvres in the mix as well, although nothing that compares with excellent first fight in Upgrade. To top it all off, a fairly strict enforcement of the PG-13 rating (which, for example, forces a beheading to be played out off-screen*) robs the action of much of its potential impact.
It's a huge shame; Early on a reconstructed M3gan trains against a kung-fu training dummy, setting up some expectations that the film will take its cues from Hong Kong movies. I wish Johnston had paid more attention to how they're shot.
As a whole, M3gan 2.0 is just OK. I admire the shift in genre and the ambition behind it, but the overwritten, soul-less, messy story plus the way the action is shot killed it for me. That it's overtly campy and tongue-in-cheek raises it a notch above your Mission Impossibles, Jurassic Worlds or Fasters and Furiosers, but at two hours it becomes really hard to swallow.
*: It also leads to a very funny curtailed "fuck" after they use up their one allotment.
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