“M3GAN” is an unintentional comedy
The horror (and unintentional comedy) movie “M3GAN,” starring an artificially created doll gone rogue, hit the theaters on Jan. 6 and quickly became the joke of the internet.
The movie features Violet McGraw as Cady, a young girl who recently moved in with her aunt Gemma, played by Allison Williams, after her parents tragically die in a car accident. Gemma is a toy engineer who decides to take on a project to console her grieving niece who is having a hard time adjusting to her new way of life. Gemma creates M3GAN, a four-foot, life-like doll, who is designed to link with its owner to comfort and protect them at extreme and unrealistic costs.
The movie starts off promising with Cady and M3GAN becoming instantly close and Gemma believing she has created the perfect “friend” for her niece. Slowly, viewers pick up on subtle hints that M3GAN isn’t the fascinating and helpful robot she was meant to be. She becomes progressively more possessive of Cady and often disappears for long periods of time. Additionally, everywhere the bizarre family of three goes, tragedy follows.
“M3GAN” attempts to shock and terrify audiences as the haunted doll trope has done in movies of the past, like the “Chucky” franchise. Yet, it is clear that the creators of the movie took current pop culture into consideration and ran too far with the idea of a trendy movie, causing it to act more as a comedy than a horror movie. Whether this element was purposeful or not, the plot has been done too many times and lacks the nostalgia that classic doll horror movies have.
There are many moments that add up to “M3GAN” losing its horror factor. For example, an attempted endearing moment where M3GAN sings Sia’s “Titanium” to Cady, ends up being the peak comical moment of the film just because of its sheer randomness. After that, it is hard to take M3gan as a threatening character.
In addition to the pure comical side of the movie, the dull and naive script gave off the effect that “M3GAN” was exceedingly dragged out. The movie seems to be a bad spin-off of “Child’s Play”, a 1990’s doll horror film. The ending is extremely predictable and very underwhelming. It is overtly comedic and lacks any type of horror element, causing even the “tiny terrors’’ to be foreshadowed.
“M3GAN” was a film that provided a good laugh but failed to live up to expectations, even after the excessive advertisement that went into its marketing.
