M3GAN 2.O Took a Franchise That Was Already Incredibly Gay and Made It Even Gayer

I didn't think that was even possible!

I find life terrifying. It befuddles me. It perplexes. It confounds. The older I get, the less I know. I had hoped that mastery would come with age and experience. It has not. Instead, growing older has engendered something closer to non-stop existential fear and confusion.

I am weak, or at least I think I am. I just wasn’t made for this whole “life” racket. I’m too sensitive. I see the world as a giant Pandora's Box full of unwelcome surprises that would destroy my fragile psyche if given half a chance.

If something upsets me, anything related to it tends to set me off.

Sometimes things are so important that you have to write about them. Trump’s re-election was a trauma like that. I had to write about it for the blog at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place or I would lose my goddamn mind. I always need subjects to blog about. For better but for mostly worse, Trump never stops giving what he calls the Fake News media material.

The same is true of my dad’s death last Saturday at 77 after a long, ultimately losing battle with life. For 77 excessively eventful years, my old man hung in there, but his living streak ended while I was watching The Life of Chuck.

The Life of Chuck is about death as well as life. You know what else prominently involves death? EVERYTHING! EVERY FUCKING THING involves death. EVERYONE dies. There’s comedy, where people fall down open manholes and it’s fucking hilarious and everybody laughs and points. Then there’s tragedy, where everybody fucking dies and it’s also kind of funny but mostly extremely sad.

Lastly, there are kid’s films, where every fucking parent dies. My ten-year-old son Declan likes to see patterns in pop culture. He has certainly noticed that Disney cartoons tend to focus on plucky protagonists (often princesses) whose parents are both deceased.

I’m going to continue writing about my dad’s life and death because it’s cathartic and I need to, but also because it’s a way of connecting with my dad, of keeping his memory alive, even as I’ve been aggressively losing paid subscribers by doing so.

I understandably forgot how death-centered M3GAN is. The film exists in the long, lingering shadow cast by the unexpected death of plucky protagonist Cady’s (Violet McGraw) parents.

BlumHouse’s kitschy horror hit had unexpected substance and emotional depth from the tricky, complicated relationship between Cady, an eight-year-old traumatized by the deaths of her parents in a car crash and her aunt Jemma (Alison Williams), a brilliant scientist who creates the hyper-advanced companion robot M3GAN to help compensate for her own lack of maternal warmth and parenting skills.

Horror film franchises often become campier, gayer, and more self-referential as they proceed, but M3GAN was already so campy, gay, and self-referential that it seemingly left the series with nowhere to go but bigger, broader, and even sillier.

The preposterous premise of M3GAN 2.0 is purloined from Terminator 2. In Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model Terminator squares off against Robert Patrick’s even more malevolent metal man T1000. In M3GAN 2.0, the titular instant gay icon is resurrected to stop AMELIA (Ivanna Sakho), an even more advanced model based on M3GAN’s programming.

M3GAN leans into its ridiculousness. It has Jemma point out the absurdity of rebuilding a kill-crazy murder machine with sick moves and an impressive body count to make her even deadlier and more destructive.

You can’t make a M3GAN sequel without M3GAN, however, so everyone’s favorite dead-eyed dancing doll assassin has been brought back to undo the mistakes of her creator.

Jemma and M3GAN have quite the double act going. They’re a horror-comedy team that pairs an evil android who will kill anyone and anything that gets in the way of her prime directive with an uptight straight woman, understandably uncomfortable with a creation that tried to murder her, being given a second chance to finish the job.

You have to be a hurricane of destruction for an AI-powered kill machine like M3GAN to qualify as the lesser of two evils, but AMELIA is supposed to be a force of nature in her own right.

AMELIA is never as badass as she’s supposed to be. M3GAN doesn’t have to worry about being upstaged in her own movie.

Like M3GAN, AMELIA was designed to resemble an evil version of the Olsen sisters, or rather, an even more sinister version of the infamous siblings.

Like Chucky, M3GAN is less an evil entity limited to a single form but rather an amorphous idea that cannot be contained or controlled, an evil that cannot be conclusively contained. In M3GAN 2.0, she’s the ghost in the machine, the glitch in the matrix, a one-woman singularity whose evil existence constitutes an endless uphill battle for survival, both for herself and Cady, the child she is programmed to protect at any cost. If that cost involves the enthusiastic taking of multiple lives, M3GAN isn’t complaining. She likes Cady. She’s programmed to like Cady. She seems more than willing to kill everyone else she encounters.

Jemma thinks that bringing back a mass murderer who nearly killed her is a bad idea. She finds it downright counterintuitive, if not inexplicable, that she’s being asked to rebuild something she barely survived. It’s like Dr. Frankenstein being asked to make a monster that’s like the one that bears his name, but make him twice as big and three times as fast.

She doesn’t have a choice in the matter. It’s either build a killing machine or be killed herself, possibly by a piece of technology that she herself is largely responsible for unleashing upon the world.

M3GAN begins with its heroine at 10. She only gets bigger and sassier from there. The filmmakers know that they have an instant camp/cult icon on their hands, with special appeal to the LGBTQ community, as a hero, anti-hero, or anti-heroine. She’s a deadly diva, a kitschy camp killer with freaky moves and a bitchy wit that would make her a natural for an evil android reboot of The Golden Girls.

Jemaine Clement continues to steal scenes as a horny billionaire showman who is a larger than life parody of Richard Branson and Elon Musk even if he exits the proceedings way too early.

M3GAN’s emotional component felt organic because it’s rooted in the death of Cady’s parents and her grief and confusion. Regular attempts at sincerity feel more forced this time around because the movie is so fundamentally silly that attempts to engage with Cady’s formative trauma or Jemma’s attempts to bond with her niece feel incongruous and tonally incoherent.

The filmmakers give the audience more of what they want, in the form of more dancing, an anime-style get-up, and an unforgettable set piece involving a song by Kate Bush written specifically for She’s Having a Baby.

M3GAN 2.0 never quite justifies its existence or its title character’s unlikely return, but it’s an enjoyable goof for the most part that asks nothing of the audience and delivers breezy, synthetic enjoyment befitting a movie about the awesome as well as evil sides of AI.

3.25 out of 5 stars