M3GAN

★★★★

Directed by Gerard Johnstone

Written by Akela Cooper and James Wan

Box up your toys and delete your AI apps, boys and girls, because if you’ve always been creeped out by life-like dolls and super-smart AI, this latest amalgamation of the two isn’t going to make things better! Allison Williams of Get Out fame plays Gemma, the creator of a sophisticated robot doll called M.3.G.A.N., whom she uses as a surrogate parent to her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) while she works overtime to keep her demanding boss David (Malaysian comedian Ronny Chieng!) from firing her. Stupidly, she forgot to put Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into M3GAN’s programming, and the android begins to test its boundaries, and eventually crosses them.

Predictably, with robots-gone-berserk movies like this one, the robot does go berserk. And no, there are no Shyamalan-worthy twists here, sorry. But what’s not predictable though is the execution, which was way better than expected in terms of how it beautifully set up its premise and the relationships between the core characters, and that includes the robot itself. I respect that they took the effort to do this when everyone was just pre-judging this to be another shoddily put-together horror cash grab that is only all about the violent pay-offs. It’s really something that the movie could make me feel relieved when certain peripheral characters survived till the end of the film, because it made me care. They even managed to squeeze in a commentary about the use of devices and gadgets to babysit our children.

This certainly isn’t a reinvention of the wheel, but it gave it new treads and a sleek, shiny new hubcap, and I have to give credit where credit’s due. Williams, McGraw and Chieng were all great here, especially McGraw.

A lot of people would compare this with the Chucky/ Child’s Play films, but I think M3GAN has more similarities with the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell. You’ll know it when you see it.