January is the nadir of the movie release calendar. Studios big and small release all of their awards bait at the end of the year, and January is when they release what’s left over. Sure, if you don’t live in a big market like I do, the aforementioned awards bait will come in over the next few weeks, but those are still technically December releases. In many cases, the good stuff won’t start to pop up again until maybe March or so. There are always going to be exceptions of course, but mostly it’s horror movies that aren’t scary or comedies that aren’t funny. Would something like the killer robot doll movie M3GAN be an exception to that case?
Possibly. Turns out it was actually released in LA in December, probably hoping for a special effects award for that impressive killer robot. But that’s no guarantee of anything.
As it is, M3GAN sets the tone in the opening seconds of the movie. A commercial comes out for a robotic pet, and the ad specifically says it’s better than the family dog the little girl in the ad is playing with at the start of the commercial because the dog dies but the robot is effectively immortal. It’s a very tongue-in-cheek response, showing the movie is just as much a dark comedy as it is a horror movie. That continues as toy designer and programmer Gemma (Allison Williams) finds herself the temporary guardian of her recently orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Gemma has no idea how to handle a kid, but a robotic doll she’s been working on, one that bonds with an individual child and learns as it spends time with the child, may make for a good companion for Cady. Enter M3GAN, and it turns out Cady loves M3GAN.
That may be something of a problem. Cady is in an emotionally vulnerable state, and M3GAN’s learning is a bit unpredictable. As stated by a therapist, Cady will probably bond with someone after her parents’ death, and it’s better that that someone is a person and not a lifelike learning robot. Factor in as well that M3GAN wasn’t quite working right to begin with, and it’s only a matter of time before the robot both learns things that Gemma and her team would have preferred she didn’t know, and that her efforts to protect Cady will lead to violence. Gemma herself may not even see it at first, and she’s supposed to present M3GAN to the world on behalf of her company very soon. How long will it be before M3GAN’s actions start getting people killed?
To start, this movie’s trailers made it look kind of like it was going to be a straight-up scary movie. Yes, M3GAN was going to kill a couple people who had appeared threatening to Cady, but the movie is also at times very funny. Williams plays a good straight role, somewhat oblivious at first to the problems around her even as things are obviously going wrong. Likewise, M3GAN’s evolution to the threat she becomes is well-handled, and the problem isn’t exclusively on M3GAN’s end as Cady isn’t exactly helping out there much. There’s more going on here than just a killer robot doll.
At least for a while. In the final third or so of the movie, it somewhat devolves into a more standard horror movie. It still largely works, and the M3GAN android is a really impressive bit of special effects magic, but there is a dip in quality as the movie draws to a close. It’s still a lot of fun, and I’d even recommend it for fans of the genre, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the tone and style I liked best more or less disappeared at a certain point to become a more standard movie of this type, and any satirical edge it might have had was gone after a time. Still, I did have a lot of fun with this one.
Grade: B
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