Divalicious Review! My, My: M3GAN Is All Grown Up
By Caroline Cao | June 26, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
Remember M3GAN? The killer AI-doll from the 2022 movie? My, she’s grown up in M3GAN 2.0, again directed and written by Gerard Johnstone (Akela Cooper of the first movie has a “story” credit), and it’s the delightfully wacky, violent and outlandish picture the M3GAN-heads could wish for in a sequel film. When it’s fun, it’s fun. When it’s a mess, it’s a hot mess.
No longer is the film anchored in a domestic, suburban scenario. Oh, it’s interior horror now has evolved into an action setpiece. The movie opens on a kind of ridiculous, trashy America-against-the-Middle-East jingoism that escalates into a nightmare of AI-robot paranoia. The U.S. Government operates its own human-like android AI-infiltrator, the AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno contributes her icy face). But just when AMELIA carries out orders to rescue a prisoner, she shoots the prisoner and then goes AWOL, throwing the U.S. government into a classified crisis.
AMELIA is after Gemma (Allison Williams), the absent-minded roboticist who brought M3GAN (physically performed by Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis) into the world to be the companion for her orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw) as a company project. In the aftermath, Gemma has taken to AI-regulations activism after the disgrace of her robot M3GAN murdering people. Aristotle Athari also joins the cast as Gemma’s new boyfriend and anti-AI partner. (This might point toward spoilers, but it does seem optics-wise that an Iranian actor was given the sorta of characterization, considering the film’s opening Middle East infiltration chapter).
In 2.0, the potty-mouthed M3GAN, who is of course not quite dead, aggressively recontacts Gemma through her technological devices. She has also somewhat assumed the role of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s villain-to-hero in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. M3GAN claims she still has her programming to protect Cady and offers possible salvation from the existential AMELIA threat. Gemma has no choice but to ally with her would-be murderbot and build her a durable body to kick AMELIA’s metal ass. Although she’s granted a taller body, M3GAN commands Gemma to keep her original, uncanny, baby-like face—for no other reason than to maintain her franchise brand.
Sometimes the movie has its kinks to work over (the scandal-ridden Brian Jordan Alvarez, playing Cole, seems to be an undoable kind of baggage). The editing tapestry of the high-octane fight scenes is skiddish with few cool 180 flipped-camera shots. M3GAN also can’t quite replicate the success of her random diva-dance, which it tries to do so.
But there is one callback that works gloriously to the tee. It’s a sappy-campy M3GAN musical solo she sings to her flabbergasted creator. To my pleasant surprise, the begrudging dynamic between Gemma and M3gan is a compelling one as she beseeches her creator like Frankenstein’s monster, pushing Dr. Frankenstein to at least buck up and take responsibility for bringing them into the world as monsters.
M3GAN is ridiculous, ideologically too. It was groanworthy that the film’s ending had to go up on the pulpit to say something about “AI is here to stay and we must adapt.” It hit as cookie-cutter polemical grandstanding. However, as ridiculous fiction, it does make a compelling case for why we like to have M3GAN around.
M3GAN 2.0 opens in theaters June 27.
Photo credit: Universal Pictures
