My quick rating – 6,5/10. Entertaining, although an extremely tame horror flick, written in part by James Wan. I am sure that you have a pretty good grasp of what this one is about, so I’ll skip that formality. I did, however, enjoy the extra bit of time they took in developing the relationship between the child (Violet McGraw) and our 10K dollar toy robot, M3GAN (Amie Donald). Both kids play their respective roles very well and definitely need a different skill set to do so.
The story itself does take time to introduce the few characters there are and give them the personalities needed for the roles. Instead of everyone just being fodder to a killer robot running around mindlessly slaughtering everyone (as I kind of thought and hoped I would get), instead, there is a more personal and at times, touching part to the whole thing. No matter if it did have that feel, the doll often just looked so damn creepy. The mix of CGI and live just worked well to give a spooky vibe. The emotionless expressions, such as the one below, just stare through you as she is plotting her next move, all the while learning everything on the go.
There was a lot of thrown-in for convenience to the story, which I am sure was completely necessary due to time constraints. I think the parental message here is quite clear, in case you thought this wasn’t trying to tell you something. Your kids will latch onto whatever or whoever shows them affection and take it to the extreme, in this case, an A.I. doll and not a cult or anonymous chat room “friend.” It has a very big budget feel for a campy type of story that I am sure helps in making it a hit, and it helps that it has built-in TikTok appeal from the get-go. I am sure you will hear both ends of the spectrum on this one since many probably thought as I did and wanted more blood, while others may be distracted by the fact that their own parenting skills are being mocked so clearly here.
But I took it for what it was and that is a modern story of the killer doll that surely isn’t anything new but has enough dark humor and overall appeal to be satisfying and I am hoping that M3GAN 2.0 does get a bit darker and “stabbier” I was thinking about this last night and it was more like Wes Craven‘s Deadly Friend to me than Child’s Play which is the more obvious comparison. And both of those definitely took the more brutal route in their stories.
There are plenty of streamers to choose from, including Amazon.