Nothing good this week.

M3GAN 2.0

Full disclosure: I love M3GAN. Not the movie, the character. I love her stupid little dances. I love her bratty little voice, her psychotic programming, the way she inflects certain words, etc. Besides Chucky and Tiffany, she’s probably the most entertaining murderous doll character out there. So it deeply pains me to report that M3GAN 2.0, while occasionally funny and clever, squanders almost all the potential this character had to become a long-running horror icon. You’d think the sequel would throw out the clunky exposition of the original and just let M3GAN cook, Child’s Play 2/Maniac Cop 2-style, but instead, it doubles down on its limp dick world-building and creates even more exposition about tech startups, artificial intelligence, and synthetic empathy modules or whatever the fuck. I didn’t come to this movie to face the impending doom of AI. I came to watch a little robot girl tear people apart while being a total sassafraz about it. Sue me!

This time around, the movie’s very clearly ripping from the Terminator 2 playbook: M3GAN, the murderous AI from the first film, is now the protector, teaming up with Cady (Violet McGraw) to stop an even more dangerous, vaguely defined AI monster who has no personality and somehow makes the concept of killer technology boring. Where Jimmy Cameron brought muscular storytelling and genuine thematic weight to T2, this feels like a poorly handled, shot-for-shot remake of that structure with none of the style, grace, or understanding of tone. In M3GAN 2.0, they talk a lot about AI in a way that makes my brain hurt, and usually when they’re having arguments about AI, nothing plot-wise is happening. If you cut out these scenes, M3GAN 2.0 would probably be 20 minutes shorter and undoubtedly better.

That said, I laughed out loud seven times. I counted. M3GAN 2.0 still delivers in flashes: her dead-eyed delivery, her thirst for violence, her willingness to go from nice to naaaasty in 0.2 seconds. The problem is she’s stuck in a story that doesn’t know what to do with her. The runtime is egregious, it’s nearly two hours long, and for a movie this goddamn dumb, that’s legally irresponsible. Alison Williams and Violet McGraw are still doing excellent work here, grounding the madness with surprisingly nuanced performances. Everyone else, carryovers and new faces, aren’t very interesting. You could replace half of them with AI and no one would probably notice.

Here’s where I’d like to pitch Blumhouse on the next sequel. It’s called M3GAN Goes to Kauai. A black family on vacation accidentally picks up the wrong luggage at the airport, guess what’s inside? M3GAN. No explanation necessary. M3GAN wakes up, bonds with their daughter, and starts killing rich white resort guests who are passively-aggressively racist to the family. We’re talking really violent, ironically humorous deaths, M3GAN Goes to Kauai is Rated R for sure. In terms of major set pieces – there’s a shark attack scene where M3GAN ends up killing the shark, a luau massacre that doubles as a dance number to Ice Spice’s remix of Elvis’ Blue Hawaii, and M3GAN tries to wear braids at one point but gets sat down by the family for a serious conversation about cultural appropriation. M3GAN learns. M3GAN grows. M3GAN becomes an upstanding member of society. This both injects much needed diversity into the graphically caucasian world of M3GAN but also a little tropical fun. This one CAN’T lose money, Jason! Grade: C+ (In Theaters)

The Woman in the Yard

I watched The Woman in the Yard because it’s trending BIG on Peacock, and that means several of you have seen it. I like reviewing either movies I want to see or movies that people have actually seen, and this one checked the latter box. I imagine a major reason it’s trending is because it’s one of the only new things out now that’s free and not because of its overall quality, cause hot damn, this is a shitty movie. This is actually one of the most agonizing cinematic experiences I’ve endured in recent memory. I heard my bones growing while watching this movie. That’s how glacial and dead-on-arrival this thing is. It’s not even bad in a fun or spectacular way. It’s poison for the soul.

And that’s what makes it extra depressing, because the lead is Danielle Deadwyler, a phenomenal actress who deserves a goddamn break already. She plays a depressed and traumatized mother stuck on a farm with a teenage boy and little girl, who kinda-sorta blame her for the death of their father in a recent car accident. The movie opens with the mom laying in bed, practically catatonic, re-watching videos of her dead husband. Then we establish that no one has left this farm in a long time. They’re out of dog food and everyone is going a little nuts. Suddenly, a woman in a black dress and veil shows up in the yard. She starts asking these “I’m having a stroke” questions and proceeds to randomly sing. She goes from “I’m confused” to “I have a secret” way too quick, and we’re confused as to motivations of this ghoul but never to what she’s supposed to “represent.” Death, grief, letting go, etc. She’s “symbolic” in the most groan-inducing, first-year-of-film-school kind of way.

Basically, the movie’s grand revelation is that to banish this ghostly woman (and really their own trauma and refusal to let go), the family needs to go outside and live their lives. That’s it. That’s the whole moral of the movie: Go outside, touch grass. Yard Lady so aggressively soft pedals its themes it feels as if the filmmaker genuinely thinks audiences are toothless, drooling Neanderthals. Probably because it was written and directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who also brought us Black Adam and four (four!!) Liam Neeson revenge thrillers. Don’t ask me which ones, they all involve Neeson punch-kicking a series of bald European men in leather jackets on a train or something.

I know people are watching this on Peacock right now, which is why I chose to review it. But please, I’m begging you—there are so many better things to stream on Peacock. Watch Black Bag. Watch Boiling Point, 99 Homes, The Blackening, Dead Ringers, or even the original Black Christmas (but save that one for December, it’s a Christmas movie!). Try Half Nelson, Jaws, Memento, The Northman, Nosferatu, Oppenheimer, Other People, Short Term 12, fucking Shrek. FUCKING SHREK. Watch fucking Shrek over this. Grade: D (Peacock)

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