M3GAN 2.0
June 25th, 2025
MOVIE: M3GAN 2.0
STARRING: ALLISON WILLIAMS, JERMAINE CLEMENT, VIOLET MCGRAW, ARISTOTLE ATHARI
DIRECTED BY: GERARD JOHNSTONE
AMovieGuy.com’s RATING: 2 STARS (Out of 4)
RUN TIME: 119 MINUTES
RATED: PG-13
The killer robot M3GAN became an instant hit in 2022, quickly going viral and earning praise from both internet circles and the horror community. Unsurprisingly, a sequel was greenlit—M3GAN 2.0, a title that practically named itself. With AI dominating headlines and public imagination, this follow-up felt as inevitable as your smartphone needing an update. But like so many sequels and spin-offs, M3GAN 2.0 trades the eerie charm of its original premise for genre bloat, ending up as an overstuffed, quasi-sci-fi action movie that forgets to tell a story worth caring about.
Two years have passed since M3GAN went rogue and tried to kill Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Since then, Gemma has pivoted her focus toward AI safety, now working with the government—and a new boyfriend, Christian (Aristotle Athari)—to ensure AI tech can’t go full Terminator again. But when Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), a new robot developed for the U.S. military, begins killing for pleasure, Gemma is forced to team up with the very creation she vowed never to face again, in a last-ditch effort to prevent an AI apocalypse.
The common advice with the M3GAN franchise is not to take it too seriously. Unfortunately, that might be writer/director Gerard Johnstone’s biggest problem. This sequel feels light-years away from what horror films like Child’s Play or Dolls achieved—stories where the danger felt personal, small-scale, and genuinely creepy. Instead, we get a studio-polished spectacle where M3GAN is slowly being molded into a superhero rather than a slasher icon. This trend—blurring horror with blockbuster formulas—dilutes the conflict between good and evil until there’s nothing left to invest in. If M3GAN is now the “hero,” what’s the point?
Despite being the title character, M3GAN isn’t even the focus here. The central conflict is Gemma’s mistrust of both AI and the people around her. There’s even a new tech suit that turns her into a sort of super soldier, adding to the film’s identity crisis. All of it feels disconnected from the creepy simplicity of the original—an early warning sign that future installments may abandon the core idea entirely.
That’s not to say some audiences won’t enjoy M3GAN 2.0. It’s not a bad movie, exactly—just a disposable one. The kind of film you forget about before you’ve even reopened your phone in the theater lobby. Its true goal seems clear: turn every horror concept into a franchise, as digestible and marketable as possible. And that’s the real horror—because if that’s the future, maybe the machines have already won.
2 STARS
M3GAN 2.0 IS PLAYING IN THEATERS FRIDAY, JUNE 27TH, 2025.
Written by: Leo Brady
