M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

M3GAN 2.0 trades its predecessor's horror mechanics for espionage, martial arts, and a good deal of noise. The android has been rebuilt, the genre has been swapped, and the result is a sequel that behaves like a franchise doing calisthenics. Its cast is diverse in the quiet, unremarked way that has become standard for Blumhouse product: a gay actor here, a Ukrainian lead there, none of it load-bearing. The film makes no argument about any of them. They simply exist, which is its own modest achievement.

The picture does have opinions, though they are mild ones. Its villain is a corrupt tech billionaire, and a second antagonist wants to purge artificial intelligence from the global economy. This is genre furniture, the standard suspicion of men with too much money and too many servers, and it never hardens into a thesis. Gemma and Cady remain capable women in technical fields, a fact inherited from the first film and never framed as a declaration. The closing scene, in which Gemma testifies before Congress and urges cooperative AI governance, offers a short sermon on technology ethics. It is a gentle homily, delivered while the credits warm up.

The absences are equally instructive. There is no climate anxiety, no body positivity, no neurodivergent arc, no rewriting of history, and no romantic or identity subplot of any kind. The movie is too busy staging robot duels to lecture us about much beyond the dangers of unregulated defense contracting. It is a sequel that lost money, lost its genre, and kept its manners. For a film about a murderous doll learning remorse, that restraint is almost touching.