Reality Bytes: M3GAN 2.0 and THE NAKED GUN

It says a lot about our current technological moment that two of the only big summer movies that speak even glancingly to it are also the most intentionally silly. Sequel M3GAN 2.0, for instance, makes fun out of the artificial intelligence bubble currently forming, in which the technology’s biggest boosters are really just salespeople lumping many functions, some helpful and many not, under one dubious umbrella. The picture is a slight pivot in mood and form from the original M3GAN, in which a toy designer (Allison Williams) makes a life-size A.I. doll for her lonely orphan niece (Violet McGraw). The fake girl is supposed to keep the real one company and protect her from harm, but then takes that directive so literally it’ll kill a mean neighbor or a schoolyard bully to do so. That film has a pretty basic slasher formula and some fine tongue-in-cheek performances. What really made it special was the eerie doll design itself, performed by child dancer Amie Donald in a partially expressive plastic mask and voiced with a pixelated mean-girl sneer by Jenna Davis. The creepy little dance she did right before she killed the main human villains went viral for a reason; it’s an eerie bit of performance, blasé and confrontational in one fluidly disjuncted wiggle. She’s not bad; she’s just programmed that way. 

But for all that movie’s modest horror charms, the sequel one-ups them in every way. Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper return to transform the genre into a gleaming sci-fi action picture. It’s every bit the T2: Judgement Day to the first’s Terminator. This time there’s a rogue bootleg bot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) escaping military control and looking for revenge against her creators, which include the characters of the first movie who mobilize a souped-up M3GAN to help fight her relentless sister birthed from the same code. The movie doesn’t take its sci-fi convolutions too seriously, seeking instead to launch into fun combat and chases and gunfights and martial arts moves. And, yes, there’s a dance sequence, too. It’s all set in glowing neon and shiny surfaces and the actors are well-calibrated to inhabit broad genre shorthand characteristics while still feeling plausible and worth rooting for. It’s propulsive and entertaining with choreography and smirking humor balanced well. Then the movie’s best ideas spring forth from its A.I. ambivalence, making all of its human villains tech billionaires and the gullible customers who buy what hyperbole they’re selling. The last twist in that theme is to make M3GAN an ever wilier bit of programming that is simply following the logic she was taught. It’s a movie that entertainingly ties up its own loose ends while leaving the larger question unresolvable. Is A.I. both the cause of and solution to our problems?

Funnily enough, there’s an evil tech billionaire as the villain in the new The Naked Gun movie, too. Played by Danny Huston with the grit and gravitas in his line readings that he’d bring to a trashy drama, it makes the totally ridiculous lines he often has all the funnier. That’s a key insight director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer (he of Lonely Island and cult classic comedies Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) takes from the original film of the same name. That was a cop movie spoof from the makers of Airplane! and Top Secret!, part of their formula of having serious actors play it straight while acting through complete absurdity at a vaudevillian level of puns, slapstick, silly signage, and cartoonish vulgarity while simultaneously riffing on cinematic tropes and forms. It was the least of those three pictures, but a solid entry in that now-dormant style. Schaffer’s new legacy sequel comedy pivots back to that older tradition, and as such is so stuffed with gags and punchlines that even if it really only hits huge laughs half the time, that’s still more than we’re used to encountering in one sitting. I found myself occasionally annoyed or exhausted, and some of the jokes here are definitely clunky, but the movie is overall so cheerfully ridiculous, and somehow both a dusty throwback and breezily contemporary, that I was delighted to be continually surprised by its eager goofiness. Even the title card has an unexpected laugh.

Schaffer does a good job making the movie look like a routine studio programmer with a rumbling score and brightly lit action, and then around every corner is a running gag or a quick punchline or a background detail that sends laughter jolting through an audience. Liam Neeson is totally serious as the lead cop, son of the original’s Leslie Nielsen. (The similarity in their names is it’s own unspoken bit of whimsy.) It’s somehow a fitting tribute to the franchise that he’s riffing on his own previous 15 years as an older action star, while fully inhabiting the obliviously incompetent cop role expected from this series. He bumbles through a goofy pulp mystery involving a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson), a hapless partner (Paul Walter Hauser), and a tough boss (CCH Pounder). That he just might end up taking down the dastardly tech guy’s criminal conspiracy to drive the world mad (an apt jab) is semi-accidental. He drinks progressively larger coffees handed to him in increasingly incongruous situations. He pronounces “manslaughter” as “man’s laughter.” Cops pull cold case files out of a freezer, and are all thinking in overlapping hardboiled narration. There are gross gags about diarrhea and decapitation (those are separate scenes). A romantic montage turns into a spoof of a high-concept horror movie. Neeson blames his misbehavior on the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show and says, “Who’s going to arrest me? Other cops!?” You get it. The movie goes anywhere for a joke, finding some of its own while borrowing gags from its predecessors, and a few from Austin Powers or Scary Movie, and is so very pleased with itself for reviving a whole style of comedy that’s disappeared. I might’ve been more skeptical if I hadn’t just laughed too much to pick nits.