Quick Synopsis: M3gan comes back, this time as a hero.

This is a terrible horror movie. That’s mainly because it’s not a horror movie. I’m used to horror franchises delving more into action or comedy, but it’s usually a few minutes in and it’s a sign of decline. I can’t remember a time it’s been so drastic as this. There’s no traditional horror movie beats, no shots that fill you with dread or keep you awake at night. What there is, is quips, fights, and weirdness.

On the one hand, the genre switch means that M3gan 2.0 is fun to watch and will appeal to a wide audience while still keeping true to the spirit of the original. On the downside, from the first trailer, where it was made clear that this time she’ll be more heroic and will be teaming up with those who defeated her in the first movie, comparisons have been made to Terminator 2. Those comparisons are much harder to ignore when the change of genre makes the movies even closer. It’s almost begging you to make those comparisons, and when it does, it doesn’t hold up.

On its own merits? It’s a lot of fun. It’s violent, funny, and kind of sweet. It has really good characterisation. Making M3gan a hero could have backfired, but it works wonderfully. That’s helped by the fact that even when she was a villain in the first movie, her entire motivation was doing what she felt she should do to protect a child. So she could easily turn them into heroes without changing their motivation. It feels like the next logical step. Her introduction is a lot of fun, with her controlling the aspects of a smart house to defeat an invading police force, who burst into a house all guns blazing to arrest an unarmed woman and a child, but because this isn’t real life, nobody got shot.

The performances are also key, the main characters from the first film return, and it’s clear they all love playing these characters. There aren’t too many new characters, but those who are introduced fit in perfectly.

Now onto the downsides. There are a few minor ones in terms of tone and consistency, and some moments are just a little bit too much like a video game for my liking. The major issue for me is the villain reveal. I live quite near a 12th-century castle. A castle, which is a crucial part of local and national history. A castle, which is vital to tourism and is a visual centrepiece of the local area. If you visit this town, you kind of HAVE to visit the castle.

That castle isn’t as clearly signposted as the villain reveal in this movie. I guessed it from the character introduction, not only that they would turn out to be the villain, but also their motivations and reasoning. It felt so obvious as the film went on, with a few “but nobody could have known this” about things which he would have known about. It’s so clear that I felt it was a red herring; I didn’t think a movie in 2025 could be this obvious with its twist. I haven’t seen a reveal this obvious since, well, every superhero movie where a character named something like “Evil Von Murderface” turned out to be the bad guy.

In summary, don’t go in expecting scares, and you’ll have one hell of a good time. It has a lot to say about AI, specifically about the role of humanity in controlling it. It’s much smarter than it needs to be, and I will always love that. I will also always love it when, in the final product, an editor takes out a really creepy moment from the trailer.