I’ll start this review off by admitting I am not a fan of spooky doll movies. I am not frightened by something I could easily kick across a room. The first Child’s Play is fine. I understand that it is nostalgic for many, but when I was a kid, I was afraid of the Easter Bunny. The Childs Play reboot asks the daring question: what if Chucky was an Amazon Alexa and featured a cast of kids rejected from Stranger Things? Even Mark Hamill, the voice of Chucky in the reboot admitted that the movie didn’t need to be made. That brings us to the other spooky doll franchise: Annabelle. I maintain that the first two Conjuring films are great, but the other ones in this series are disposable, especially The Conjuring 3:The Devil Made Me Do It. You can track the downfall of that series by seeing when James Wan left.

The reason I bring this is because James Wan produced our topic today: M3gan (pronounced Em-three-gan by scholars such as myself.) After having already seen Avatar: The Way of Water and being beaten senseless by M3gan’s social media advertising I had no choice but to see the movie. So why did I enjoy mM3gan so much?

 M3gan is one of the most fun movies I have seen in a while. It doesn’t take itself seriously and is very funny to boot. The whole movie kind of makes fun of the fact that haunted doll movies are stupid, while doing everything the Child’s Play remake could not. Child’s Play 2019 just gives Chucky an app and calls it a day, while M3gan goes deeper than that. M3gan throws some commentary into it that was more than just “phones are bad” like we can in the Child’s Play reboot.

M3gan is mostly about bad parenting by just slotting your child in front a screen for every waking moment, treating the family iPad as a babysitting service. But it is also about how our social media feeds are reflections of ourselves. These points are never made in such a preachy way where you mutter to yourself, “okay I get it.” M3gan keeps it very tongue in cheek and lighthearted.

M3gan is also quite funny. The titular doll is incredibly passive aggressive and there are quite a few really great line deliveries and jokes that got a good laugh out of me. The film isn’t very violent, so I think squeamish people could still get enjoyment out of it. Rumor has it that after a few scenes went viral on TikTok they trimmed it down for a PG-13 rating. This bloodless carnage did not hamper my enjoyment of the film whatsoever, I personally thought it matched the overall tone of the film pretty well.

 January and February are usually a period to dump movies that studios don’t have much confidence in, but M3gan turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s nothing mind-blowing but is fun and certainly worth the price of admission. Besides, the kids need some good PG-13 horror movies. You can do a lot worse than M3gan.