“M3GAN” Is An Instant Cult Classic – BuzzFeed News

Stripped of this context, the movie is not bad, but not exceptional. Its plot points are skimpily justified: Cady’s parents die convenient horror-movie deaths; Gemma finalizes M3GAN within a week, despite having spent $100,000 and untold years tinkering on it unsuccessfully; various characters make pointed allusions to how the rushed timeline of M3GAN’s release means she can’t be properly safety-tested. Its best punchlines are reserved for random side characters, who have the freedom to be truly funny, whereas Williams and McGraw must walk a tight line between seriousness and camp that often forces them to hold blank, wide-eyed expressions of confusion or fear.

As for the underlying emotional plot of the film, in which Gemma uses M3GAN to stifle her own anxiety and Cady’s grief, it never gains traction. The movie uses it as a narrative engine but doesn’t dig into the genuinely intriguing nuances of this relationship triangle. Toward the end of the film, a distraught Cady threatens her therapist with scissors and slaps Gemma clean across the face. In this one moment, you begin to wonder whether M3GAN learned her violent impulses from Cady, who, after all, is the person she’s been programmed to mimic. A truly tragic story glimmers in the wings — one of a child eviscerated by unthinkable loss, searching everywhere she can for distractions that will help her cope, kindling a violent anger for the world that the world mirrors back to her.

But that’s a different movie. The one we get is more blasé and more ridiculous, more concerned with glossy aesthetics and quick riffing. It’s not a movie you watch for the airtight quality of its storytelling or the subtlety of its technological cautionary tale. It’s a movie you watch because its titular character is “archly iconique,” unnecessarily couture in a satin pussy bow and matching double-breasted jacket. Because it is at once breezily familiar and very, very weird. Because it has a highly specific, out-of-pocket sense of humor, which is campy and offbeat and so clued into the pop cultural appetite for irony that it’s sometimes difficult to tell what’s supposed to be a joke.

And while many of the movie’s best moments of physical comedy have already been given away in its marketing, M3GAN retains a few tricks up its sleeve: a riotous opening scene, discreet text-based visual gags, and multiple jokes involving songs so perfectly chosen I’m struggling not to spoil them here. M3GAN’s plot is functional, and its thrills are solid, but its sense of humor is uniquely vibrant, both weirder and funnier than expected even after months of hype. ●