Movie Reviews

M3gan 2.0 Has No Idea What It’s Doing

Published

11 months ago

June 27, 2025

M3gan 2.0.
Photo: Universal Pictures

At first glance, a sequel to the 2023 killer-teenage-girl-android flick M3gan would seem like an easy layup, a chance to re-exploit the knowingly goofy mix of horror and comedy that turned that film into a refreshing January hit. In reality, such self-aware lightning rarely strikes twice. M3gan played its absurd premise with a largely straight face, but watching that film’s single and reluctant maternal figure, ambitious and overworked roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams), conjure a cyborg best pal for her traumatized and orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), we grasped the ironic ruse. Just about everybody in the movie was serious. Its surfaces were serious. Its gestalt, however, was pure howling derangement, and that dancing robot cut through it all like a knife in a pussy-bow minidress.

With M3gan 2.0, writer-director Gerard Johnstone opts for action instead of horror, and the film feels like it wants to be a frothy spy flick. M3gan herself (played by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) was defeated in the previous film, but now there’s a new, more powerful cyborg menace, Amelia (short for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android, and played by the Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno), “the next evolution in military engagement,” whom we first see in an opening scene on the Turkish-Iranian border as she slices and shoots her way through a gaggle of goons in an attempt to save a kidnapped chemical scientist. Trouble is, she turns out to be something of a double agent and turns on her U.S. military overlords. Gradually, it falls to Gemma, Cady, and their pals to revive M3gan in an attempt to stop the seemingly indestructible Amelia, who is hell-bent on becoming all-powerful and conquering civilization.

So it’s Good Robot versus Bad Robot, a Terminator 2: Judgment Day–style expansion into mainstream mayhem — superficially understandable, since the first Terminator was also something of a horror film that was subsequently franchised into an action series. And yet M3gan 2.0 is a baffling movie, relying less on the conceptual humor of its predecessor and more on occasional quips and a few genuinely silly gags. (When M3gan is first brought back, she’s given the body of a small, plastic, Teletubby-like robot to keep her from committing any violence. Later, she sings Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” in an attempt to praise Gemma’s parenting skills.) But by and large, M3gan 2.0 feels like it just wants to be a generic action movie. There’s also enough blather here about the perils of artificial intelligence that one wonders if the filmmakers actually expect us to pay attention to the details of the plot.

More tragically, M3gan 2.0 abandons its characters, who had been the secret of the original’s success. The first film’s tonal tightrope only worked because Williams in particular walked it so well, with her dry delivery perfectly capturing the obliviousness of Gemma’s disastrous attempts to hack her own life. And McGraw, just 11 at the time, ably managed her character’s traumatized-child horror-speak. The contrast between their sincerity and M3gan’s homicidal sassiness lent real power to the picture’s parodic swings.

But this time, all these characters are largely reduced to running and cowering and breathlessly scheming to find ways to take down Amelia; they’ve become mere action protagonists, and not particularly interesting ones at that. One wonders if Johnstone is simply trying to set a kind of template he can return to over and over again as these films presumably generate more sequels. In so doing, however, he’s ironed out the idiosyncrasies that made his original work so well. The results are thoroughly middling — not funny enough to qualify as comedy, not exciting enough to qualify as action, not smart enough to qualify as a cautionary tale, and certainly not weird enough to keep the M3gan ethos alive.

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Movie Reviews

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

Published

40 minutes ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

by Sean P. Aune | May 9, 2026

Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.

We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.

Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.

The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.

This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.

Dangerously Close

I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.

An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?

The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.

Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.

Fire with Fire

Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.

Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.

This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’

Last Resort

Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.

George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.

There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.

Short Circuit

Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?

NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.

Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.

His whole character is mystifying.

Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.

1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: AFFECTION – Assignment X

Published

13 hours ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026

AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.

There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.

Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.

But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.

The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.

Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.

Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.

The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?

AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.

Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.

We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.

As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.

Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.

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Movie Reviews

8News Reel Talk: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ movie review

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

8News Reel Talk: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ movie review

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”

The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:

Deanna: ★★★★.5

Allison: ★★★.25

Julia: ★★

To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.