Not scary doll dud tries too hard to be campy

Toys “R” Ugh.

M3GAN, the AI doll with looks to kill, was always going to come back for more carnage. 

Not because her simple story warranted it. The fun first film was a huge box office hit in 2022. Of course they’d wring it dry.

I did not, however, expect to get completely fed up with the sassy piece of plastic by just the second movie. The second minute! She’s already leapfrogged to “Leprechaun 4: In Space,” except with neither luck nor charm.

With “M3GAN 2.0,” the filmmakers have employed a bold strategy: Take a $180-million formula, shred it and forget it.

The stupid sequel, again directed by Gerard Johnstone, is not, by any stretch, a horror movie. 

Instead, the fembot has returned in an annoying, forgettable and hard-to-follow action-comedy, like a thinky “Austin Powers” or “Spy,” that isn’t remotely scary.    

“Seed of Chucky” is “The Exorcist” next to “M3GAN 2.0.”

What the flick desperately desires is to be campy. Gay bar fodder. “Rocky Horror,” it’s not. But boy is it rocky; two hours of obnoxiousness with scattered giggles at the doll’s dry putdowns.

Allison Williams is here again as Marnie — sorry, I mean Gemma — the high-strung inventor who has about-faced on artificial intelligence after her traumatic experience with M3GAN. 

Now she rails against the dangers of AI, and builds tech to enhance humans rather than replace them. She has a boring anti-AI boyfriend named Christian (Aristotle Athari), whose trajectory is 100% clear from the second he opens his mouth. 

But Gemma, Steven Seagal-obsessed niece Cady (Violet McGraw) and the Geek Squad are forced to team up with former foe M3GAN to defeat an even worse AI creature called AMELIA (Elizabeth Olsen impersonator Ivanna Sakhno).

They wind up in some fake-looking castle. M3GAN reveals she is a martial arts expert. There’s a subplot about brain implants and a perfunctory self-destruct countdown clock. 

This is a movie you’ve seen a million times before, wrapped in a three-year-old meme, without a famous comedic actor, and saddled with a mumbo-jumbo script. 

In lieu of scares — not even an easy jump scare — M3GAN begs for laughs like an out-of-work Borscht Belt comic. 

You wait for her to shout, “Take my wife, please!”

M3GAN serenades Gemma with Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work.”

In an attempt to force lightning to strike the same place twice, she does another dumb dance.

M3GAN briefly inhabits a Teletubby-esque toy. 

And on and on.

I laughed here and there — perhaps out of amusement, perhaps out of the need to clear my throat. But a series of stitched-together social media moments does not a movie make. 

Forget giving horror the old heave-ho. “M3GAN 2.0” is also beige as far as action comedies are concerned. The film is too tied up in its mind-numbing technobabble dialogue to effectively blend fights and funny. 

Like its nuts-and-bolts main character, this is a movie that’s very confused about its own identity.   

And because M3GAN’s the marquee star, everybody else throws in the towel. Nobody has a personality. Doll and dull.  

“With every passing moment, I can feel my mind fragmenting,” M3GAN says. In that scene, she’s speaking for us all.