‘M3gan 2.0’ updates its programming for a cheeky action-thriller

Any technology we don’t fully comprehend we turn into horror, a truism that reaches back to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (medical science) and ahead to “The Ring” (VCRs). Of late, the bogeymen have been AI and robotics, so we get movies like “Ex Machina” and villains like the Entity in the “Mission: Impossible” movies.

And “M3gan” (2022), which mashed up “Ex Machina” and Chucky from the Child’s Play franchise for a big, goofy hit about an artificially intelligent doll that takes its directive to protect its owner to murderous extremes. A sequel was inevitable, and since the only thing anyone talked about with the first movie was the doll, in “M3gan 2.0,” she has morphed from the series’s creepy-crawly villain to something very much like its hero. This is not a spoiler, this is canon. (See “Terminator 2.”)

The movie itself has metastasized from a tidy scream fest to a noisy, sprawling action-thriller-sci-fi extravaganza with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Which would be annoying if the filmmakers took any of it seriously. But writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.

Also returning are Allison Williams as Gemma Forrester, the roboticist and toy developer who invented M3gan and in the new film has become a vocal advocate for limiting children’s access to technology (reasonable enough when an AI doll has tried to kill most of your friends); Violet McGraw as Gemma’s niece Cady, now a moody 12-year-old and budding computer coder; and Gemma’s research associates, stalwart Tess (Jen Van Epps) and klutzy Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez).

Where’s M3gan? As the end of the last film hinted, hanging out in Gemma’s smart-home network, waiting to be re-bodied. When a bigger, badder AI cyborg from a Department of Defense operation goes rogue, Gemma and her team are tasked with finding it before it finds the film’s MacGuffin, which isn’t exactly a floppy disk, but you’re getting warm.

I can tell you that M3gan does make an eventual triumphant appearance in her original form, which is to say she still looks like an extra Olsen twin left out in the lab overnight. (Amie Donald continues to play the doll in scenes where the character isn’t straight-up CGI, and Jenna Davis once more provides M3gan’s chipper/snarly voice.) Before then, there’s some fine found comedy involving the genie of M3gan in the bottle of a Teletubby-style toy, and the striking Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno has been cast as the rogue cyborg, Amelia, giving off a chilly/sexy Terminatrix vibe that’s the scariest thing in the movie.

But where “M3gan” was content to dabble in jump scares and PG-13 slasher tropes, “M3gan 2.0” has its eye on the bigger prize of anchoring the title character as a major pop-culture icon. (Think Freddy Krueger or the Minions.) The sequel is full of soldiers and SWAT teams running this way and that, busy fight scenes and action sequences, a miraculous basement research facility with everything you need to stop Armageddon, a secret villain you’ll spot from the first frame, and everything short of a countdown doomsday device. Whoops, the movie has that, too.

It also has a willingness to undercut any solemnity with welcome silliness. Jemaine Clement (“What We Do in the Shadows,” “Flight of the Conchords”) is deliciously pompous as a tech CEO with a neuro-implant that gets him out of his wheelchair and onto the dance floor - it’s a pity “M3gan 2.0” doesn’t do more with him. M3gan herself/itself has been given all the snarky comeback lines but still bursts into treacly pop songs at the most inopportune times. The movie feels preprogrammed, but the programming works.

Williams’s task is to keep a straight face as the film’s nominal lead character, which she does ably and rather anonymously. Anyway, the humans are decidedly secondary in this franchise. There are some half-formed ideas in the script about using technology cautiously if we don’t want to lose out to the coming AI master race. But based on the likely box office receipts for this movie, I’d say the AI has already won.

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Two and one-half stars. Rated PG-13. At theaters. Contains strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material, brief drug references. 119 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.