A pleasantly nutty thriller about a crafty, high-end toy, “M3GAN” exploits a child’s grief for the greater good of the killer-doll genre. That may be enough for 100 minutes of your early January.
The writer Philip K. Dick once asked: Do androids dream of electric sheep? M3GAN, which stands for “Model 3 Generative Android,” looks as if she/it dreams only of Nicole Kidman in “To Die For.” She’s a fast learner, this wide-eyed miracle of artificial intelligence and machine learning — mean girl, nice girl and killing spree all wrapped up in distinctive dance stylings, interesting eyewear, cunning emotional manipulation skills, and a way of running through the woods like a wolf in a skirt. Also — this part is great — she boasts an unerring sense of exactly when her primary human companion, a grief-stricken young girl, needs comforting, and a few bars of the sappiest you’ve-got-a-friend-in-me ballad in the history of song.
There is, of course, a human element to the story, even if robotics expert Gemma (Allison Williams) never quite seems human herself. Gemma works for the Hasbro-like toy firm Funki, maker of the talking, pooping “PurrpetualPetz.” Squirreling away research funds for their under-the-radar development of M3GAN, Gemma and her design colleagues Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) come up with a game-changer: M3GAN, an American Girl for the rest of us, carrying a $10,000 price tag (in other words, squarely in the American Girl range). The Funki CEO (Ronny Chieng) sees nothing but dollar signs.
