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.