M3GAN 2.0 (2025) review

Robot designer Gemma (Allison Williams), who lives with her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), is approached by Col. Sattler (Timm Sharp) from the U.S. Army, who tells her that an android they built named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) has decided she no longer needs to follow orders, so to combat it Gemma and her team reluctantly rebuild killer doll M3GAN (Amie Donald, with Jenna Davis as her voice) ... and yet, after the events that took place in the first movie, Gemma doubts she can be trusted.  With all the talk in the media about the rise of artificial intelligence, this provides timely talking points and argues that the burden for ensuring machines don't become evil is on humans (like, duh) and it wisely doesn't take itself seriously - M3GAN sings a Kate Bush song, transforms into a flying squirrel and does a TikTok dance in a shiny costume - but its silliness gets the better of it much of the time and the "story" (which lifts elements from both Terminator 2 and Fritz Lang's Metropolis) could have used some judicious trimming.  To get Gen Z in the theatre, they made sure it had a PG-13 rating (even though there's a severed arm) ... and their core demographic still didn't show up, although they'll most likely watch it on streaming and find it to be a "guilty pleasure."