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M3GAN Reviews

Though all the special effects and artificial intelligence on display awe, the plot’s intentionally ludicrous second half and its mix of genres (comedy, horror and sci-fi) leave the film devoid of much needed conviction and substance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 18, 2024

A brilliantly fun juggling act of eerie themes, campy humour and sincere drama, there is something for everyone here.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2024

Films like M3GAN provide the right amount of clap-inducing ridiculousness you would want from a film about a killer toy that, ultimately, looks like Chucky's nepo-baby.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 5, 2024

This is a very well made and entertaining horror film, maybe the best I've seen since 'The Invisible Man' (2020).

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 27, 2024

M3GAN is chaotic, dumb — and nearly perfect. It's an off-the-wall, irreverent, and absolutely on-target sci-fi slasher-satire about a killer-kid robot ... [that] accomplishes nearly everything it attempts, and everything the buzz promised.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 16, 2023

Sometimes you know when something has cult-classic written all over it, and although M3GAN might be too of the moment to achieve that, it certainly has camp-classic stamped on it.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2023

Finally a killer doll movie where the doll doesn't just sit and turn its head. I need 10 more M3GAN Movies.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

Viewers will leave the theater with guilty-pleasure glee from drinking in M3gan’s witty escalating kill skills and choice of victims. The film’s worth the price of admission just to see the can-do doll’s rubbery smooth facial reactions.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023

This movie doesn’t leave us as gagged as Cooper’s previous film, this one is smarter while checking most of the same boxes. So while haters are going to hate, M3GAN is refreshing, fun, and throwing us quite a bit to chew on without talking down to us.

Full Review | Aug 14, 2023

M3gan may not dream of electric sheep, but she’s got some killer dance moves and a CPU as delightfully wicked as any femme fatale.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Akela Cooper's premise is pushed to its limits - and even beyond - being elevated by excellent performances, a clever satirical narrative, eyebrow-raising killings, and meaningful messages about parenting and technology's role in a child's upbringing.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 25, 2023

Exactly what the trailer sells you on & some more! a completely self aware insane, Horror movie that has some great social commentary on parenting, AI, & DEATH.. You’ll laugh, you’ll jump, you’ll go home never wanting your kid to play with a toy again.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

M3GAN is a safe play. It’s a little weird, but nothing truly off-putting, vague enough to appeal to a multitude of demographics.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

The writing is a bit surface level and predictable, but it’s so easy to overlook all of that when you’re having a time that’s as fun as this movie is.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 19, 2023

Sharper and more satisfying than we have any right to expect a movie like this to be.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Apr 25, 2023

Needless subplots and superfluous characters tend to distract, but when the malevolent AI is front and center, the movie really hums.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 1, 2023

A surprisingly effective and clever killer doll film. M3GAN instantly leaves her mark and solidifies herself as a new horror icon. But the real surprise is all the extra layers and ideas about technology, grief, and taking the easy way out.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Mar 24, 2023

M3GAN is good at keeping us hooked to a film that we know how it will turn out. It never plays safe when putting children in danger and body count is terrifyingly high. This is one silly, but highly effective film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 23, 2023

Pleasing in its familiar, unsurprising lines, which are basically those of a Twilight Zone episode. I am not complaining.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 10, 2023

After quite a long build-up, the film doesn’t provide as much killer-doll action as we deserve, but the scenes we get are highly entertaining.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2023

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‘M3gan’ Review: Wherever I Go, She Goes

A state-of-the-art robot doll becomes a girl’s best friend, and dangerously more, in this over-the-top horror film.

In a scene from the film, a robot doll with long hair and wearing a brown peacoat, stands, while looking blankly.

By Jason Zinoman

Allison Williams has a knack for playing it straight. She brings a convincing realism to the most preposterous situations or maybe she’s just an actor with limited range. Whatever the reason, it works, especially in the tricky genre where comedy meets horror. She excelled in a critical role in “Get Out,” and now in “M3gan,” a ludicrous, derivative and irresistible killer-doll movie.

Williams plays Gemma, a robotics engineer with no maternal instincts who suddenly must take care of her young niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), after a car accident turned her into an orphan. The synthetic skin of this movie is about how Gemma learns to take care of a child. Thankfully, its bloody heart is far sillier. It’s the comedy of a primly composed mean-girl android turning into The Terminator.

This is the kind of scary movie that needs a lead performance that is strong not fragile, deadpan not showy. Williams capably updates the mad-scientist archetype, refusing to pause and ask questions while inventing a doll of the future, one who pairs with a child and adjusts to their needs, filling in as best friend and big sister. Gemma uses Cady as her test case.

In a headier movie, there might be some misdirection. But M3gan (performed by Amie Donald) is clearly pure evil from the start. She’s a great heavy: stylish, archly wry, intensely watchful. Her wanton violence never gets graphic enough to lose a PG-13 rating. In early January, when prestige holiday fare tends to give way to trashier pleasures, a good monster and a sense of humor can be enough. This movie has both, and it makes up for a slow start, some absurd dialogue (“You didn’t code in parental controls?”) and a by-the-book conclusion.

While the trailer invited comparisons to “Child’s Play,” the slasher film featuring the doll Chucky, that movie had a much grimier, disreputable undercurrent before the sequels and reboots turned goofy. “M3gan” moves with a lighter touch. There’s a scene where a police officer who is investigating the disappearance of a dog blurts out a chuckle, then apologizes, saying, “I shouldn’t have laughed.”

I would have preferred a handful more guilty guffaws, though there are a few, including one where M3gan treats a real bully like a doll, with disposable parts. But the tone here sticks to just enough camp to keep the crowd smirking. The director Gerard Johnstone doesn’t go for elaborate suspense sequences or truly intense scares. He wants to please, not rattle. And while there are some hints at social commentary on how modern mothers and fathers use technology to outsource parenting, this movie is smart enough to never take itself too seriously.

It’s helped by the comic Ronny Chieng playing Gemma’s boss, a forever annoyed toy manufacturer who, at a rare moment of contentment, trash-talks Hasbro. Any horror fan knows that his jerkiness is as much a sign of impending doom as coeds having sex at a summer camp. When the moment arrives, it does not disappoint. M3gan struts, cartwheels, dances, makes no sense at all. What a doll.

M3gan Rated PG-13 for cursing, a ripped ear, ruining your childhood. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.

Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for The Times. As the paper’s first comedy critic, he has written the On Comedy column since 2011. More about Jason Zinoman

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‘M3GAN’ Review: A Robot-Doll Sci-Fi Horror Movie That’s Creepy, Preposterous and Diverting

Allison Williams plays a robotics wiz who invents a doll that seems fake and real at the same time

By Owen Gleiberman

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Williams, who is one of the film’s executive producers (its two high-powered producer-auteurs are James Wan and Jason Blum), invests Gemma with a winningly jaunty, at times clueless hyperrationality that makes her both the film’s heroine and its rather innocent digital-age Dr. Frankenstein. Gemma, an obsessive prodigy of robotics, had been ordered by her boss to abandon the M3GAN project. But the film opens with a (contrived) cataclysm that nudges her into secretly going ahead with it. Her young niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), is on a ski trip with her parents when, in a freak accident, their car gets run over by a snowplow.

Gemma takes custody of the newly orphaned girl, and while she seems utterly adrift about what someone Cady’s age might need (like, say, a bedtime story), her failure as a caretaker is part of the film’s satirical design. “M3GAN” takes place in a world — ours — where parents, bemoaning how much screen time they allow their children, give into the impulse anyway, because it feels both easy and inevitable. The film says that we’re already letting computer technology raise our kids. M3GAN the willowy programmed companion who always says the perfect thing becomes the logical culmination of that trend.

Once Cady imprints her fingers in M3GAN’s palm, which automatically programs the doll to become her special companion, their relationship makes everything else seem boring, at least to Cady. The film parallels their insular friendship with Gemma’s attempt to turn M3GAN into a hot new product. She places Cady and M3GAN in a playroom behind one-way glass, using them to demonstrate the toy’s amazing abilities to her boss (played, with a riveting short fuse, by Ronny Chieng). He is sold, and begins to plan the marketing rollout of this revolutionary new toy, which will be put on sale at $10,000 a pop.

But the more they plan, the more that M3GAN, on her own, is causing mischief, starting with the confrontation she initiates with Gemma’s cranky next-door neighbor (Lori Dungey) and her dog. M3GAN has been programmed to have “emergent capabilities,” which means that the more she interacts with people the more she learns how to do. That certainly applies to her fighting style, a kind of stiff-limbed rapid zombie dance that leaves nothing in its wake. At a certain point, you realize that “M3GAN” has become a movie about a killer doll who knows how to use a nail gun.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, Jan. 3, 2023. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 102 MIN.

Production: A Universal release of a Blumhouse Pictures, Atomic Monster production. Producers: Jason Blum, James Wan, Michael Clear, Couper Samuelson. Executive producers: Allison Williams, Greg Gilreath, Adam Hendricks, Mark David Katchur, Judson Scott, Ryan Turek.
Crew: Director: Gerard Johnstone. Screenplay: Akela Cooper. Camera: Peter McCaffrey, Simon Raby. Editor: Jeff McEvoy. Music: Anthony Willis.
With: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Ronny Chieng, Jen Van Epps, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Lori Dungey, Jack Cassidy, Stephane Garneau-Monten.