You probably saw the trailer for M3GAN the other day, the newest movie from Blumhouse and Atomic Giant, James Wan’s production company. It’s now on streaming, so here’s our review. The story for M3GAN is:
“A robotics engineer at a toy company builds a life-like doll that begins to take on a life of its own.”
It stars Alison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chang, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and Jen Van Epps. Gerard Johnstone is director and the story is by James Wan with the screenplay by Akela Cooper.
The story isn’t all that original and it’s pretty predictable to be honest, but overall, the movie was OK.
It starts off with an advert for Funzo, I mean PurPetual Pets, a new fun toy that can be your best friend. As soon as I saw it, I thought of Funzo, the evil toy from an episode of The Simpsons.
We then follow Cody, a young girl, in a car with her parents. She has a PurPetual Pet that was sent to her by her aunt. The parents are killed and Cody ends up with her aunt Gemma, who’s a robotics expert for a top company.
Gemma is working on a project called M3GAN, a new interactive toy that will take the world by storm. Cody ends up ‘imprinted’ on M3GAN., Things look good, and it could be on course to be the biggest toy in the world.
You can guess where the rest of the story goes. I’m not going to go into the details and spoil it, but basically, M3GAN will do anything to protect Cody.
The movie isn’t reinventing the horror genre, but at the same time, it’s not terrible. I did find myself laughing at some of the subtle comedy moments and, I have to say this, the M3GAN doll is creepy! If I saw it in a hotel corridor, I would hope to be wearing my brown pants that day.
As I said, M3GAN, overall, was pretty good fun. The characters were all good and the acting was good, although young Cody took you out of the movie now and then, but that’s a minor note. Alison Williams is someone I am happy to watch.
The story is pretty good, but nothing unique. It reminded me of Gremlins; kid gets a new ‘toy’, and dad wants to sell the toy to every house in America, but the toy ends up a murdering creature hell-bent on destruction.
The only other complaint I had was the tonal shifts of the movie, sometimes it seems all over the place. The first act is all nice and sweet as Cody and M3GAN become friends, and the second act gets darker, but the third act seems to swing around, even having the doll doing the creepy ‘possessed girl weird walk’ along the floor.
There is also a shift in M3GAN as a character. She’s not so much the Terminator, just killing for the sake of it. There is a moment where she kills one guy and then explains how she’s going to frame someone else for it.
In The Terminator, Arnie is there for one reason, to kill Sarah Conner. There is collatoral damage but at no point did Arnie kill one of Sarah’s friends then set it up to look like a car accident. I don’t know, maybe having M3GAN as a ‘thinking’ killer made it better, but it just seemed a step too far for me.
Again, I’m being picky. I did enjoy the movie Tt was fun, and creepy in places, and I was happy to follow the story. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but I would watch it again for a giggle.
M3GAN is now streaming on most big networks to rent in the right US now.
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