Chucky Becomes Jason Bourne (but as a Lady)

If we’re all being honest we didn’t need a M3GAN sequel. Sure, there have been plenty of sequels no one felt they needed (like Highlander II: The Quickening, which has to retcon the entire end of the original film to even make a sequel possible), but it does feel like M3GAN was a one-and-done that ended conclusively enough that a sequel just wasn’t necessary. A girl robot is made, goes evil, kills a bunch of people, and then is eradicated. You told all the story you needed to tell, so what more is there to do with the character?

Having watched the sequel, M3GAN 2.0, the answer is: not much. At least, not much in the horror sphere. M3GAN is, effectively, a technological reinvention of the Child's PlayAlthough some might have thought that the idea of a killer doller slasheer flick couldnt' support a multi-decade spanning franchise, Chucky certainly proved them wrong, constantly reinventing his series, Child's Play to stay fresh and interesting three decades later. films, with a killer doll doing the killing. It’s just that instead of voodoo magic transferring the soul of an evil criminal into a doll’s body, M3GAN had it be bad programming that caused the doll to go all murdery (ironically Child’s Play also had a reboot that basically did the same thing, and yet M3GAN did do it better). If we’re following that same trajectory, the M3GAN series would either have to keep creating repetitive sequels doing the same thing over and over again or they’d have to go the Bride of Chucky route and find a way to take a concept that was already becoming staid and reinvent to get really weird for the health of the series.

M3GAN 2.0 goes weird, that’s for sure. The creators, Gerard Johnstone (director and co-writer) and Akela Cooper (co-writer on this film and writer of the original movie), clearly thought that they couldn’t just do more of the same horror and they had to go a different direction. Boy, did they ever, taking the murderous death bot and turning her into a super-spy, ala Jason BourneLost without his memory, but bearing a particular set of skills, Jason Bourne has to figure out who he is and just why everyone seems to want him dead., or the preprogrammed T-800. It’s different, I’ll give them credit for that, but in turning the murder toy into the heroine of her own film, the movie loses all sense of tension, scares, thrills, or horror. This is a far more generic, and far less interesting, superhero film dressed up in the remnants of a horror sequel.

It’s been two years since the murdered robo toy, M3GAN, went evil and effectively crashed her own production line’s launch. Since then her original creator, Gemma (Allison Williams), has worked to rebuild life for herself and her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). Gemma stopped working on AI projects and has pushed towards ethical technology and robotics. She wants to make the world a better place but is steadfastly against giving up any control over to machines ever again. Unfortunately for her, the tech is coming for her whether she wants it to or not.

Her original tech for the M3GAN project somehow fell into a mysterious developer’s hands. They, in turn, used the tech to make a new robot, AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), which they then sold to the U.S. government so it could be used for covert ops. The only problem is that AMELIA has gone off the reservation. Since her escape she’s worked to kill anyone and everyone that ever touched the M3GAN project, and Gemma is clearly next on the list. But the U.S. Government also suspects that Gemma is somehow in control of AMELIA and is using her for her own nefarious ends. Gemma needs help clearing her name and stopping AMELIA. Thankfully, the bitch is back as M3GAN isn’t dead, and she’s ready to get rebuilt and stand up to fight AMELIA and save the day.

If there’s any flaw with M3GAN 2.0 it’s that the film never properly explains why M3GAN could go from murderous death bot to safe and protective ally. The whole point in the first film was that M3GAN was willing to kill anyone or anyone that got in her way, all for the sake of keeping Cady safe. She was twisted and pure evil, but the sequel simply handwaves that away. “Whatever Cady wants is what I want, and I just want her safe,” is the end of the explanation, and the film drops it after that. From that point forward the film never once makes us doubt that M3GAN is a good guy now. Not once.

It’s a problem because you can’t just wipe away all that she did before, not and still have her be the same character. We’re supposed to believe that this is the same M3GAN, digitally uploaded to the net before Gemma eventually builds her a body again (I’d consider that a spoiler if it wasn’t in the trailers for the film) and yet she’s functionally a different character. If the film said “this was a backup that didn’t do all the things the original M3GAN did,” or if they said, “it was a new experiment that maybe goes bad, maybe doesn’t,” then that would be something, but the film never does that. Instead it says, “now she’s just good, end of story.”

There’s actually storytelling potential that could have been gleaned from wondering whether M3GAN is a bad guy or a good guy. She could act crazy and put people in harm’s way, but then it’s revealed she was doing it for the right reasons, and that would be something. Instead, immediately she’s neutered and forced to be good, and then just embraces it and there’s no tension over it at all. The film never lets M3GAN indulge in her nasty, murderous self, hoping that just letting her kick ass and do sick dance moves (you remember those from the first movie, right?) will be enough to gloss over the flaws.

Maybe we could have accepted this if it felt like AMELIA (which is, for the sake of this film, the 2.0 version of M3GAN) was actually a threat. The film, though, barely does anything with her. Instead of setting her on a mission to kill Gemma, which would actually force M3GAN to decide if she wanted to protect Gemma or let her die, AMELIA is caught up in a plot about some other killer robot from the 1980s and her quest to connect with it for… some reason. The whole storyline is underbaked and the film never, not once, convinces us that this is some great threat that has to be stopped.

It’s actually hilarious how much the film fails to develop AMELIA into a big threat. At one point she gains control over all the world’s technological infrastructure and, for a second, she shuts everything down. All the heroes hide in a bunker that M3GAN somehow had built, and M3GAN says it’s the end of the world. Two scenes later they’re out and about again, at a tech conference, and all the doom and gloom, end of the world talk is completely forgotten. It was such a big threat that it lasted for all of five minutes, in the middle of the second act and then never mentioned again.

And all of this is for some half-baked action sequences and pretty lame humor. The first film was creepy and satirical in equal measure, all while giving us a pretty solid villain. The sequel loses all of that, though, failing to provide anything as fun, interesting, or gory as the first film. It’s an incredibly lame and bloodless action movie (I can’t even call this film horror at this point), all for the sake of… what? Franchise building? The hope that somehow this would spawn more sequels? Well, M3GAN 2.0 underperformed at the Box Office, making a paltry $39 Mil against a production budget as high as $25 Mil. That’s a bomb in most books, likely sinking any hope for the future of this franchise (beyond one spin-off, SOULM8TE, that is getting dumped out in January 2026).

Clearly this film had no clue what it was doing, and I think that’s because the creators really didn’t know what to do. The first film ended on a pretty hard conclusion so this sequel has to swing wildly to retcon away what it can while also finding a new threat for the heroes. They said, “we love M3GAN too much, we can’t let her be evil or die again,” so they go out of their way to do anything they can other than make the villain of the first film be a villainous girl-bot again. It betrays everything about the character, stranding her in a film that can’t even get out of its way to have any fun.

There is probably a lot you could do with this franchise. A killer robot that can be quippy and sarcastic while having fun slaughtering over and over again, all while also having the ability to transfer her consciousness from one entity to the next? Yeah, there’s the potential for easily seven or so films and a TV series. We know that because everything I just described also applies to the Child’s Play films, and that’s how many of those we got. M3GAN could have easily been the next Child’s Play, letting its murder bot have murder fun in multiple murder films. Instead the sequel wasted all its potential and created probably one of the most underwhelming horror sequels we’ve gotten in some time.