M3GAN 2.0 is louder, longer and more convoluted than its predecessor, but does that make the sequel superior to the original?

That’s for you to judge, but we would bet that the consensus will be that M3GAN was better the first time around. The sequel, written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who helmed the original, is set two years after the events of the first movie. Gemma (Allison Williams) has learned her lesson and now advocates for the regulation of Artificial Intelligence before Congress and has written a book about raising kids without technology as much as possible.

She still lives with Cady (Violet McGraw), her orphaned niece and the reason she invented M3GAN (once again played by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) in the first place, and she still works with Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps) on new projects that don’t commit mass murder. She even has a new suitor, Christian (Aristotle Athari), who shares her vision of a brighter future sans too much tech.

But no one can stop progress, even when it’s bad, so Gemma is a bit outmatched in her fight against the inevitable AI takeover of the world. There’s an obnoxious tech bro modeled along the lines of Elon Musk (but played by Jemaine Clement so much more palatable) who helps to run Gemma’s campaign to limit AI off the rails.

Even more threatening is AMELIA, played by Ivanna Sakhno, another autonomous robot made by someone (that’s the mystery) using the schematics Gemma developed when she created M3GAN. But where M3GAN was bad in her zealous attempts to protect Cady, AMELIA is just bad. Bad enough that the feds suspect Gemma sold her plans to an unfriendly nation.

This of course means that it’s up to Gemma to stop AMELIA, and the most powerful weapon she has is M3GAN, who despite being deactivated in the original movie, is going to be resurrected, because otherwise there’s no reason for there to be a sequel.

What follows is a protracted battle between Gemma and M3GAN, M3GAN and AMELIA, Gemma’s team and the feds, the feds and AMELIA, and of course, Gemma and the party or parties responsible for the whole mess. There are numerous fight scenes, with thunderous noise that rumbled the seats in the theater.

The result is a sequel that is tonally very different from the original. M3GAN was menacing and violent but it had some great funny set pieces that helped the murder go down with a smile. 2.0 has a lot of battles that have none of the charm and humor that we enjoyed in the first. In fact, there was only one laugh-out-loud moment in the whole film during the preview screening. That scene also includes a frank conversation between Gemma and M3GAN that briefly brought back the feeling of watching the original.

Those moments are few and far between, though, with much of the movie’s two-hour runtime devoted to fight sequences that seem to blur together. And M3GAN herself gets a lot less screentime here than she did in the original, which is a shame, because the audience is (we assume) basically only there to watch her dance in stylish outfits as she commits manslaughter. If there’s a M3GAN 3.0, hopefully there will be much more of the title character.