M3GAN 2.0 Tries to Fake a Cult Classic

What doesn't work about the film, and if cult classics can be constructed at all.

Editor’s note: This essay briefly discusses the last act of new release M3GAN 2.0 in its final paragraphs.

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In 2022’s M3GAN, robotics engineer Gemma Forrester, played by the always excellent Allison Williams, decides to offload her adoptive parental duties to the world’s most advanced AGI android, M3GAN. Like any good paperclip, M3GAN takes her directive to protect young Cady, played by Violet McGraw, to its logical, murderous end. The film was a hit. Hits get sequels.

M3GAN 2.0 begins with the new android, Amelia, played by Ivanna Sakhno, performing a black op in Iran. At the height of the mission, she goes rogue and disappears, beginning a killing spree targeting everyone connected to her creation. It turns out Gemma Forrester is one of these targets, since Amelia was developed from M3GAN. After some back and forth with slimy federal agents, Gemma decides to resurrect M3GAN to fight the new threat. M3GAN, meanwhile, has apparently reformed herself in a manner never explained. She has realized the errors of her ways, and is now a hero. They bring her back, taller, stronger, more powerful. The stage is set for an intentional cult classic.

Unfortunately, an intentional cult classic is almost a contradiction.

A cult classic can be broadly defined as a movie in which the audience must forgive some aspect of the film. It could be the inadequate budget, bizarre acting, or rushed writing. The cult of a cult classic is as in love with the flaws of the movie as they are with its virtues. It is that strange mixture of aesthetic force and poetic success married to failures of craft and taste that make cult classics intoxicating. Only a fool would say Showgirls would be better if it was more coherent or conventionally acted.

Unfortunately, M3GAN 2.0 suffers from the malady of trying to be a cult classic, and it does not succeed. It deliberately aims at memeability, even if this means betraying the characters or breaking the economy of its story, and comes off flat. What’s left is a disjointed, dull movie that seems to misunderstand what charm the more horror-driven M3GAN had to offer.

The difficult feat M3GAN 2.0 attempts can, in fact, sometimes be achieved. A deliberate cult classic can be purposefully made. The roots of the modern intentional cult classic can be traced to filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and John Waters. These types are movie nerds who are earnestly obsessed with dumb flix and want to see more. To succeed, the intentional cult classic requires someone who sees themselves as smart enough to “get it,” while at the same time being able to avoid condescending to their own work. Quentin Tarantino and John Waters had enough verve, aesthetic force, and sheer love of cinema to get past the baggage of turning the emergent into the artificial.

In contrast, the contemporary avatar of the failed, overly deliberate attempt at a cult classic is director Ti West. His X film series is as try-hard as it comes. Mia Goth’s performances as Pearl and Maxine are over-acted callbacks to the under-trained scream queens of the ‘70s. Mia Goth is a good actress, but her performances are irritating in the X film series, characters reduced to a patchwork schtick of older, better movies that I, Ti West, and everyone else have already seen.

Compare Ti West to Alex Garland. Alex Garland is making genuine cult classics, and he’s doing it earnestly. Garland, for whatever flaws his movies have, is a “serious” filmmaker. There’s not a wink or any bit of knowing, toxic irony in any of his films. The fact that they can be kind of stupid in no way undercuts his seriousness. Stupidity is not a vice in cult kino. Bad faith is.

M3GAN 2.0 attempts to reach for cult classic flavor by making M3GAN herself into a machine built for quips. It gives Cady an affection for Steven Seagal, and spends far too long attempting quirky, genre-aware bits that reduce the earnestness of the film for little gain. Even M3GAN’s penchant for violence has been replaced with a compulsive need to read people, in a strange tone shift from the well-liked first. These are all affectations, calculated and dispassionate contrivances, and they are grafted onto what is otherwise a dully conventional film.

The sad fact is this: M3GAN is the charismatic megafauna of the movie, and the filmmakers somehow made her…boring. They made her sassier, gave her another dance to echo the first film, and, in a piece of cringe, had her sing Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work.” They also robbed her of her sadistic cruelty and her unrelenting, obsessive love for Cady—that is to say, her prime motivation.

Ultimately, she’s not even an anti-hero. She ends up saving the world. M3GAN chooses to sacrifice herself to save those she loves. How lazily Christ-like for a killer android, and how T2. M3GAN 2.0 starts as a strange comedy and ends up a superhero movie. Cult classic it is not.

Like any superhero movie, its ending is overlong, with too many details to wrap up, too many twists, too many sudden reversals. The ending is too happy. Good conquers evil. Love is stronger than death.

We’ve seen it all before, and better.