Director: Gerard Johnstone
Writer: Akela Cooper (story & screenplay) and James Wan (story)
Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chieng, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Brian Jordan Alvarez
As someone who used to write film reviews for a living I genuinely don’t know where to begin with this review.
When it comes to modern horrors my expectations are never high. I’ve yet to find one that actually does what its genre expects. Something that makes me jump is not a horror. For me a horror should make me feel nervous, build tension, any maybe even make me uncomfortable. Most fail to do this. M3gan failed on all levels.
Allison Williams was good in ‘Get Out’ but in this, as Gemma, it’s just a lot of poor acting. Fortunately for her I think the acting was poor because the writing was so bad. Nothing she did made me want to like her, in fact, at one point I was hoping M3gan would just take her out, grab Cody and disappear. Violet McGraw did a nice job as Cody and I look froward to further performances where she gets a better written character. Someone who did do a great job was Amie Donald as M3gan. She portrayed the movements of a robot incredible well. It made the character believable as a robot trying to appear human. In fact, as robot she had more personality than Gemma. So much so I wondered if there would be a twist where Gemma turned out to be a robot too. Sadly not.
The poor writing really does destroy the film in so many ways. The company just doesn’t seem to care about any liability, no one said to Gemma “hey, you’ve got a child coming to live with you, maybe get some toys?” and not one person thought “you know what, she’s just lost her parents and is struggling, maybe we shouldn’t make her an experiment?” Also, theres a child psychologist in this movie. At no point did she say “Gemma, Cody tells me …” and start listing the absolute shit the child is expressing.
It is impossible to believe someone could be so ignorant to a child’s needs but also uninformed by any of the children’s services that would have been involved.
The reason none of this is mentioned? Well, the poor writing is the only thing I can think of.
The only redeeming feature of this film is the corridor dance scene. Although it makes zero sense to the movie it was still enjoyable to watch. It’s just a shame it lasted all of 20 seconds.
I rated this movie a 3 out 10 and it only gets those three points for Violet McGraw, Amie Donald and the corridor dancing. Other than those three points it was atrocious.
As ever though, go see it, make your own mind up.
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