THB #720: M3GAN 2.0
M3GAN 2.0 sucks.
I mean, this is just a mess of a movie.
And it got even worse for me when I came home and threw on M3GAN (which was not easy… it’s not on Peacock, so I had to renew my STARZ subscription to get the film and while the tech looked like an easy iPhone-supported purchase, I had to push the purchase through 3 times before going to the web server for STARZ to make it work), which is not exactly Citizen Kane, but was remarkably better than the sequel, director and this-time-writer Gerard Johnstone seeming to regress from the first film to the much more elaborate second.
And that said, I am still going “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes because this film is not about filmmaking, it’s about fan service. And the film, in spite of its low skill level, does that effectively. It fails hard… but it also delivers for a high percentage of the people who want to see it. And it will work on TV when it gets there… because sometimes a movie is a little incoherence… and on TV, that feels right.
What was most fascinating about returning to M3GAN was to see how much that first film pivoted on Allison Williams, who is a good but not exceptional actress. But for the purposes of M3GAN, she was just right. She delivered a pro performance, surrounded mostly with a smorgasbord of New Zealanders and Georgians (U.S.), this time mixed in with some Canadians - who deliver okay performances but plenty of tax credits.
Thing is, the first film is, dare I say it, elegant in its understated ways. Williams’ Gemma is overburdened by taking on her niece, Cady, after her parents die in a car accident. The first act - about a third - of the movie is M3GAN-free, aside from the failure of the robot in its first test for the boss at the office. The set-up from there is simple… she is to protect Cady, first and last. And “she” does that. In the dicey sales presentation, M3GAN sings to Cady, which has become a meme… and the song was co-written by Johnstone. That is the kind of movie the first film was. Handmade… and that made it lovable between all the violent beats of M3GAN taking everything too far.
The reason M3GAN is so meme-able is that it is so simple and clean. It’s not asking to be meme-ed. It happened organically. When Johnstone pulls back and offers some of his perspective shots, he takes this little thriller/horror thing and turns it nearly Kubrickian for a moment here and there. This is most true in this image from a distance (and the push-in is fantastic). The audience knows M3GAN is sentient and playing “doll,” just as we know that something is terribly wrong with Leonard but we don’t know exactly what he is capable of doing. I don’t want to overstate it… but I think that was the kind of ambition Johnstone was showing in the first film.
Johnstone steals, as almost any good artist must, from all kinds of sources. The Dick Donner The Omen is a big one. The humor of violence combined with the innocent face and ornate costumes. Hitchcock. Friedkin and Carpenter clearly influenced some of the physicality of the robot. There is plenty of Wes Craven and all the teen-kill movies referenced. The dancing M3GAN probably was inspired from some Asian thriller I have never seen, but it’s brilliant. (The herky-jerky stuff at the end is boilerplate, crossing over since Ringu.) It’s a pretty ambitious movie that, in this month of Jaws50, benefited greatly from its limitations.
M3GAN 2.0 is like a movie made by someone with completely different ambitions than M3GAN, but with most of the same limitations. Johnstone’s skills as a high-action director are not special or even very focused.
The movie faces the Superman problem… which is not a reference to the new movie, which I haven’t seen yet. Once you have an unstoppable force, one of the few avenues left, dramatically, is to challenge it with an equal or greater force.
The movie opens with that force, Amelia, on a violent mission. And we are in a whole different movie. Instead of a weaselly tech-bro fighting for his overpriced company in the very funny and terse Ronny Chieng, we get the always-magnificent Jemaine Clement as a cartoon-ish variation on Elon Musk who is not just interested in money, but is using the tech to correct for his physical limitations. (Of course he is in the film far too briefly.)
The idea that M3GAN has been limited to her “software soul” is clever enough and the first act of containing her is clever and funny. But again, it changes the idea of what the movie - the franchise - is about. The comedy in the first film comes from the juxtaposition of what we know and what the characters in the film know. The comedy in M3GAN 2.0, when it works and when it doesn’t quite work, is the film asking the audience for those laughs. As a result, the whole movie lacks both tension and menace. It doesn’t lack violence. It has a lot of violence. But the element of anticipation is almost completely gone. We know what is going to happen. We may enjoy the execution of those moments, but the level is lower.
This film is about the execution level we expect of full-on action movies or thrillers or even horror films. At that level, M3GAN 2.0 is a mediocrity at best. It’s the 2nd single off the album… which is sometimes sensational… and more often a bust. It’s also why so many directors beg off of a sequel because they know they shot their shot and everyone hopes a new voice will raise the game for audiences (see: Alien, et al)
One of the core problems here is a lot of WTF stuff. Why does Amelia really need to go kill everyone connected to her creation? All the stuff about the AI robots taking control of everything is right out of some other franchise. As an audience, are we really expected to see M3GAN as the “better” robot? When M3GAN refers to herself as “that bitch,” the audience laughs and the franchise dies a little.
But for me, the bigger problem of just being as entertained as much as I would have liked, is the execution of the action. The budget for this film apparently tripled from the original. But it’s not enough, combined with Johnstone’s limited action skills, to make this anything close to an A-level action movie. (Deeper pockets often mean that the stunt coordinator and team control the action that you talk about as you leave the theater.)
My complaints beg the question, what would I have preferred? And I don’t know that I have a good answer. Maybe a story in which M3GAN has a rival for Cady’s affection? Maybe they got the next generation of M3GAN’s right and they are as popular as American Doll and M3gan’s digital spirit can’t stand it, so she comes back to be the AI dolls’ Che Guevara (putting aside arguments about Che)… and maybe some of the dolls she is leading overeach and start killing humans, causing M3gan to need to stop them because they aren’t staying in line.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that goals include rolling back M3gan’s bloodlust as a character (at least for 2 acts), giving her a major challenge, and creating some sort of rivalry.
And really, they could have eliminated the original group completely. Nothing against Allison Williams, but the movie is not about her, it’s about robot girl. She could be anywhere. She could be the White House Press Secretary. She could be a movie star. She could be a singer/songwriter.
But instead, she is in M3GAN 2.0.
Sigh…
Until tomorrow…