The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
Megan (or M3gan, because “3” and “e” are totally the same thing) has been heralded as Child’s Play for Gen Z. In a sense, that is an accurate description. Megan is a boring, bloodless, goreless, neutered chore of a film that couldn’t possibly offend or frighten anyone. So, yeah, its Child’s Play for Gen Z because its frigging garbage.
Allison Williams stars as a toy designer named Gemma, whose niece, Cady (played by Violet McGraw), was recently orphaned when her parents her killed in a car accident. Gemma adopts Cady, but is preoccupied with work and developing the title character, a doll with artificial intelligence. After Cady has a strong response to seeing a similar robot called Bruce, Gemma decides to pair the Megan doll with Cady as sort of a test run. Spoiler alert, but the doll gradually becomes psychotic. Don’t worry, though, nothing particularly scary happens.
I could criticize this movie for being unoriginal, but I won’t. The main narrative in the media is that this is a modern take on Child’s Play, which assumes that you’ve forgotten that the 2019 remake of Child’s Play already reinvented Chucky as an A.I. doll. I also haven’t heard anyone make comparisons with Morgan, the 2016 movie about a killer A.I. robot with a title that is completely different from Megan (I’m not going to keep calling it M3gan because I have to live with myself). But that’s fine. The horror genre, especially slasher films, aren’t exactly known for originality. I just need them to be entertaining and fun and that is where this movie falls flat on its face.
I’ve been vocal about my dislike of PG-13 horror movies and Megan is a 102 minute highlight reel of why I despise watered-down horror. This film becomes sleep-inducing once you realize that any menace has been sacrificed in order to get the kid-friendly rating, and that realization will come pretty early in the running time. The kills aren’t just offscreen, they are completely innocuous. This doesn’t feel like a theatrical horror film as much as it does an episode of Goosebumps, and that might be an insult to Slappy the Dummy.
What’s particularly irritating is that this film was shot with an R-rating, but then those dancing doll videos got so much attention on Tik-Tok that the studio thought “hey, we need to tone this down so that these idiot kids can get a ticket!” And so, all of the gore was removed, scenes were reshot to reduce the scare factor and we are left with this void of nothingness. Director Gerard Johnstone (whose prior film, Housebound, is actually quite good) even claimed that these reshoots made the film even scarier. Look, I understand that you have to say such things for marketing purposes, but that’s just fucking ridiculous. The dog scene is one such scene that was reshot for a PG-13 and Johnstone claimed that the newer version is much more intense. What the fuck happened in the original version? Did someone just hear a dog bark in the distance and then go on with their day? The scene couldn’t possibly be less intense than it is in the released version, so I call bullshit. And that’s what this movie is. A toned-down bore designed for kids because of Tik-Tok. Fucking great.
I’m also baffled by the critical consensus that this movie has something interesting to say about modern children’s overdependence on technology. I’ve even heard that Megan is like if Child’s Play was directed by Paul Verhoeven (director of Robocop and Total Recall). My ass. Verhoeven was a master of subtext, inserting social commentary as a layer beneath a story, available for those that wanted to peel things back and look for it. There is no subtext here, only text and not particularly insightful text either. Cady becomes too reliant on the doll for meeting her social needs, but the film doesn’t do anything meaningful or subtle with that premise and it ultimately amounts to very little. The original Child’s Play (and, to an even more interesting degree, the underrated Pinocchio’s Revenge) also touched on themes of childhood overdependence and Megan does nothing new with the concept or the theme despite the addition of artificial intelligence to the mix. Saying that kids have become too obsessed with the internet is about as insightful as saying that the sky is blue and Megan never gets any deeper than that.
As irritated as I was while watching this, the performances saved it from being an F. Allison Williams is excellent, overcoming the shortcomings of the script to bring some sense of heroism to a cliché, oblivious parent figure character. Similarly, Violet McGraw is given little to work with and makes the best of it, making Cady a surprisingly tolerable child character despite the tepid and predictable material. Despite being a muted and lame threat, Amie Donald is also to be commended for her performance as Megan and the design of the character has an oddly realistic look and feel to it (even though I kept thinking it looked like a weird miniature doll of Elizabeth Olsen). The performances, characters and designs could work if the producers actually allowed this to be a real horror film.
Megan is to horror movies as Papa Roach is to heavy metal. Papa Roach is a heavy metal band for people that don’t like heavy metal. It has guitars and the singer screams sometimes, but its safe. It’s not too extreme or complicated or threatening. You can play it around your kids or your grandparents. Megan is the same thing. It’s a safe, gutless movie that goes through the motions of a horror film without ever crossing the line into anything that might actually frighten or shock the kids in the audience. Can’t wait for the sequel.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3GAN#/media/File:M3GAN_Poster.jpeg
