An AI inventor and the doll she created team up to stop a robot assassin.

Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ivanna Sakhno

PG-13 (some bloody violence)

1:59

Area theaters.

The sequel to a hit horror film takes a radically different tone.

In the opening scene of "M3GAN 2.0," a female hostage held somewhere in the Balkans begs for her life. Meanwhile, 7,000 miles away in Palo Alto, California, an FBI agent and his team remotely monitor the situation using possibly extralegal technology. The hostage is shot, an informant is killed and a weapon of mass destruction goes missing — and that’s just in the first five minutes.

That screeching sound you hear is from the tires of a horror franchise hanging a hard left into a whole new genre. What happened to the characters of "M3GAN," the 2022 horror hit about an AI-powered doll that becomes murderously protective of her tweenage owner? They’re here, but now in the service of a sci-fi-espionage-thriller that’s breezy, cheesy and good-humored, if still a bit bloody. It’s not exactly "Mission: Impossible" — think more along the lines of Jackie Chan’s "The Spy Next Door."

Allison Williams returns as Gemma, the tech-whiz whose whose M3GAN doll went bananas in the first film. She’s now a Silicon Valley scold, preaching less tech time for kids in her book, “Modern Moderation.” She’s still guardian to young Cady (an appealing Violet McGraw), but she also has a twerpy new beau, Christian (Aristotle Athari, channeling Mark Zuckerberg) and a creepy new suitor, the billionaire Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement, fun as always). Appleton wants Gemma’s help in merging AI technology with human biology, but she refuses. "If you put an AI inside a human brain," she says, "it’s not gonna ride shotgun."

Believe it or not, returning director Gerard Johnstone (also taking over writing duties) manages to blend all of this — with relative smoothness — into a preposterous story that resurrects the original M3GAN (tween actress Amie Donald, with the auto-tuned voice of Jenna Davis) and introduces AMELIA, a robo-assassin played by Ivanna Sakhno. (Her name stands for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android; imagine The Terminator as a hot blonde nightclubber and you've got the gist.) Before you know it, "M3GAN 2.0” has become one of those movies where people infiltrate fabulous parties and talk to each other through invisible earpieces, but the resourceful Johnstone still finds time to reinvent the little M3GAN dance that became a TikTok sensation in 2022.

So, who exactly is this movie for? Surely only a child could get truly swept up in the storyline, but there’s also some real bloodletting, including a severed arm and at least two impalements. Maybe the target audience is simply anyone who’s up for a few laughs. "M3GAN 2.0” definitely has a sense of humor about itself: The last line of the closing credits reads, "This work may not be used to train AI."