Producers: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Charlize Theron, A.J. Dix, Beth Kono and Marc Evans   Director: Victoria Mahoney   Screenplay: Greg Rucka and Sarah L. Walker   Cast: Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Veronica Ngo, Henry Golding, Uma Thurman and Chiwetel Ejiofor   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C-

One has come to dread Netflix attempts to create action franchises for their insatiable audience.  Remember the Russo brothers’ “The Gray Man,” a big-budget bomb so bad that even Ryan Gosling could do little to rescue it?  Sequels and spin-off are apparently still in the works, nonetheless.  Or Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon,” the dreadful “Star Wars” ripoff that managed to limp along for two installments in 2023-24 but, despite plans for further episodes, appears to have been mercifully put on indefinite hiatus.  These are but two examples.

The streamer was a bit more successful with “The Old Guard,” Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2020 action flick about a bunch of gung-ho heroes who foiled nefarious plots against humanity.  It was pretty much a standard-issue piece of high-energy schlock, but its source, Greg Rucka’s graphic novels, gave it a hook with a certain distinction: the members of the crew were all immortals dating from different eras (ancient Greece, the Crusades) who could revive after being killed—until for some inexplicable karmic reason their immortal state was abruptly terminated.  The plot, involving the machinations of a Big Pharma mogul to tap into their power for his own purposes, was nonsense, but it allowed for plenty of “historical” backstory, interpersonal complications and action.  It also brought a couple of new members into the fold.

And it didn’t hurt that the leader of the group, Andromache, or Andy for short, was a sexy Scythian warrior played by an attractive, athletic Charlize Theron.

Now half a decade later Rucka returns with a continuation featuring the same cast and a few new characters but helmed by a different director, Victoria Mahoney.  She proves proficient enough, but the plot—which, unsurprisingly enough, turns out once again to be about extracting the members’ power of immortality for nefarious purposes—is a bummer.

The picture begins with what’s become the obligatory action prologue, with the Guard attacking a remote estate and offing its army of defenders to take out a bigwig bad-guy, who’s quickly identified as merely one more underling to an as-yet unknown master plotter.  Not so coincidentally, as it happens, another immortal forbiddingly named Discord (Uma Thurman) rescues from her watery repeated grave Quỳnh (Veronica Ngo), Andy’s onetime partner, who’d been convicted of witchcraft five centuries before and submerged in an iron maiden, in which she drowned and revived over and over again.  Discord recruits the angry, sullen Quỳnh, who believes that Andy had abandoned her, for her plan—which, she says, aims to end the race of immortals completely and involves bombing a secret Chinese nuclear facility. 

Andy and her team—lovers Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), who met as enemies during the crusades; recent addition Nile (KiKi Layne), a soldier killed in the Afghan war; and Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), the veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who was exiled in the previous installment but is now welcomed back into the fold— aim to foil Discord.  They’re aided by another newly introduced immortal, the librarian Tuah (Henry Golding), whose collection of books was raided by Discord but remains a font of information and speculation about the history of immortals, and by Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the ex-CIA man who’s become the Guard’s quasi-manager.  Andy, of course, also wants desperately to reconcile with Quỳnh.

Rucka and co-writer Sarah L. Walker work hard to add some depth and surprise to what’s happening, including an act of self-sacrifice also presented as one of atonement, but nothing—not even the fight sequences, competently but unimaginatively choreographed by Georgi Manchev, or the effects (VFX supervised by Charlie Iturriaga, SFX by Uli Nefzer)—lifts the movie from a prevailing sense of drabness and familiarity.  Mahoney does what she can to inject some energy into the proceedings, but she’s hobbled by Barry Ackroyd’s gloomy cinematography, Paki Meduri’s dreary production design, Mary E. Vogt’s equally uninspired costumes and, especially, Matthew Schmidt’s listless editing.  The generic score by Ruth Barrett and Steffan Thum is of little help.

Nor does the cast seem terribly invested.  Apart from Layne, who’s energetic to a fault, and Thurman, who affects a pose of utter disdain, everyone seems slightly fatigued rather than ready for action.  One can understand why: they must have read the script, which ends with a dull thud of recognition that this is but the middle episode in a projected trilogy, the end of which may be another five years off.

Deriving from an inauspicious beginning—the mediocre Part I—this sequel never promised much, but it delivers less. 

Producers: Jason Blum, James Wan and Allison Williams   Director: Gerard Johnstone   Screenplay: Gerard Johnstone   Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Aristotle Athani, Timm Sharp, Ivanna Sakhno and Jemaine Clement   Distributor: Universal

Grade: C-

In making the obligatory sequel to 2023’s surprise smash “M3GAN,” director Gerard Johnstone—who also assumes the writing duties this time around, original scripter Akela Cooper only sharing a “story by” credit—chooses an unlikely path.  Rather than following the lead of the lamentable “Chucky” franchise by having the titular (and snarky) doll-turned-killer continue its murderous ways at the center of a reliable slasher franchise, Johnstone goes in another direction, turning M3GAN into something akin to an action heroine in a comic thriller pitting her against an even more advanced version of herself. 

While one can admire the decision to eschew the obvious, the result is unfortunately a disappointment.  The initial “M3GAN” had a pretty sharp satirical edge, as well as some genuinely creepy horror elements, for its first two acts, but stumbled into generic mayhem in the final lap.  By contrast this follow-up starts with a dull, unfunny spoof of espionage conventions and never really recovers, though there are some amusing moments along the way to an expectedly overdone finale.  It’s an update that proves inferior to the original, intended either as a cautionary tale about the dangers of AI or as a spoof of the genre of cautionary tales about AI, which is already dangerously crowded.  It’s hard to say which. 

The movie begins not with M3GAN, the doll programmed to serve as the best friend to, and protector of, the child with whom the AI-controlled toy is partnered; she’s been destroyed, at least physically, after becoming entirely too devoted to defending Cady (Violet McGraw), the orphaned niece of the device’s creator Gemma (Allison Williams) from threats real and imagined.  Instead we’re introduced to AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, spruced up in CGI), the prototype of the more advanced version of M3GAN developed by the US DOD using Gemma’s design, on her first mission.  But instead of saving a kidnapped scientist from his terrorist captors, she goes rogue and kills him, much to the distress of her supposed controller Colonel Sattler (Tim Sharp, whose mugging is grating rather than amusing).

That will prod Sattler to rather violently approach Gemma for her insights. But she’s a different person; though her relationship with Cady, now a rebellious teen, remains fraught, she’s become a crusader against unleashed AI, especially when it comes to its possible negative impact on youngsters.  Indeed, she’s joined a group headed by smooth-talking Christian (Aristotle Athani), a possible romantic partner, to promote responsible technology.  Nor does she work on toy development anymore; along with her erstwhile co-workers Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps), she’s testing an exoskeleton that will endow a human user with robotic strength—while rebuffing the suggestion of sleazy tech mogul Alton Appleton (Jermaine Clement, as unfunny, in his own way, as Sharp) that it be enhanced with his brain neuro-implants.

News of the threat posed by AMELIA leads to the reemergence of M3GAN, who may be absent physically from Gemma’s home but has remained a presence there nonetheless.  At first Gemma embodies her in a cute little plastic android M3GAN compares to a Teletubby, but soon the voice provided by Jenna Davis is reunited with the form familiar from the first film (Amie Donald, with even smoother CGI) to track down and eliminate AMELIA.  As to what the latter is after, it has to do, somehow, with a conspiratorial group headed by the real villain of the piece (whose identity won’t be revealed here though it will be obvious to anyone but Gemma quite early on) and with a robot dating from the 1980s that has been imprisoned for decades because of its potentially devastating power.

There are episodes in the movie that fans of the original will react to with glee—a dance that M3GAN performs at an AI convention, a completely bonkers sequence in which M3GAN comforts Gemma about her uncertain parenting skill by singing her a song viewers will be expected to know.  That joke goes on too long, but so do the bouts of battle between M3GAN and AMELIA, which result in our heroine’s being torn to shreds more often than one cares to count.  Much else becomes tiresome as the film drags on to a full two hours, with M3GAN’s one-liners getting increasingly heavy-handed.  The necessity of inventing bits to justify the presence of Alvarez and Van Epps, and even Cady (the girl’s skill at martial arts becomes a go-to crutch in the latter stages) merely adds to the feeling of flabbiness despite all the action. 

Perhaps that bloated feel could have been alleviated has the characterizations been sharper or the performances better.  Gemma, most notably, is a drab creation, and Williams’s stiffness does her no favors, while McGraw’s Cady gets short shrift here.  And while together Donald and Davis give M3GAN spunk and spark, Sakhno’s blankness makes AMELIA a bore despite her physical dexterity, and Athani is practically an embodiment of tediousness.  As for Alvarez and Van Epps, they work hard to enliven the little they’ have to do, to no avail.

The movie’s been given an appropriately metallic sheen in the production design of Adam Wheatley and Brendan Heffernan and Toby Oliver’s glossy cinematography, as well as in Jeriana San Juan’s costumes (especially those designed for M3GAN and AMELIA) and in the animatronics and visual effects overseen by Adrien Morot and Kathy Tseoften.  But Jeff McEvoy’s editing isn’t crisp enough, and the fight scenes are often pretty murky, while Chris Bacon’s score makes little impression.                                     

But the fundamental problem with “M3GAN 2.0” is the basic concept.  It subverts expectations, but replaces them with something that’s not a satisfactory substitute, with the absence of any real horror elements a particular drawback.  Call it an experiment that, like the original M3GAN or the new AMELIA, has gone awry.