Review: M3GAN needs to be recalled

The long-awaited M3GAN is hitting theaters today. Another horror offering from Blumhouse, M3GAN tells the story of an orphaned girl who finds solace with her aunt’s invention, M3GAN, a robotic doll with a mind of her own. However, as M3GAN learns and grows, she gets more violent. So is it worth a watch? Let’s get into it.

Starting with the positives, I liked M3GAN’s design: she occupied just the right spot in the uncanny valley. She’s unnerving but not unpleasant to look at. Truly, the only reason this film is being shown in theaters and not going straight to streaming archives is the design. It makes for some funny trailers, that’s for sure.

But don’t let the meme dances fool you: whatever you are hoping to get from M3GAN, be it a legitimately scary horror film or a so-bad-it’s-good failure, you will be disappointed. Overall, M3GAN was a joyless and boring experience. And I’ll be fully honest about this: I walked out on it. A friend and I sat there for a good hour and change before deciding we had seen enough and ditched to hop to something else. I say that more in the interest being transparent for this review than to just rag on the film, but yeah, I also kind of want to rag on the film.

For you horror fans out there, I’ll tell you right now this film is not scary in the slightest. The reason for that is that the scares all rely on M3GAN. In a movie with a smarter, more patient script, M3GAN’s growth could have been a slow burn. Think, for example, of the suspenseful pace of 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, this isn’t a smart script, it’s a Blumhouse script, so it uses cheap jump scares with loud sounds to startle you, and occasionally kills a character. That’s what horror is to Blumhouse. So M3GAN is more as a monster-of-the-week slasher villain than anything truly frightening.

M3GAN is not scary, funny or thoughtful

Beyond the horror element, the script in general is quite bad. The crux of it is the relationship between a recently orphaned girl and her guardian aunt, who because she is incapable of parenting creates M3GAN to do it for her. That’s not a bad place to start, but it gets bogged down with an uninteresting story about the toy company where the aunt works and trying to impress a board of rich randos to invest in M3GAN as a product. Not scary, not interesting, and not funny, despite the movie’s pitiful attempts at humor.

What should be the most interesting part of the plot, the niece-aunt relationship, is weightless, and not just because of the script. The acting is superficial and cringeworthy. Allison Williams, who plays the aunt Gemma, is awful, never changing her expression or tone. The performance rings hollow the whole way through. She is by no means the only actor giving a poor performance, but she is the protagonist, and she stands out.

M3GAN didn’t immerse me in its story, it never made me scared, it couldn’t even get me to laugh ironically. It just annoyed me, and it annoys me even more to think about how often Blumhouse runs this scheme of making cheap horror movies for a quick buck. With a budget of $12 million, there is a good chance Blumhouse will make its money back on M3GAN, but if there is any justice under heaven, it should tank. Keep your receipts for this one folks, because M3GAN will be sure to have you running for the returns desk.

Grade: F+

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