253. M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

[00:00:38] Welcome to SpyHards - A Spy Movie Podcast, I'm Agent Scott. And I'm Cam the Provocateur, and Scott... Yeah? Welcome to the Pleasure Dome. Of all the quotes from this film, you went to welcome to the Pleasure Dome. How do I not? I mean, as soon as I heard that line, I'm like, there it is, bingo bango. I mean, I could have gone with I have a yeast infection in my vagina. You could have, you could have, but I went with the Pleasure Dome. I went with the one I felt

[00:01:05] comfortable saying as an intro. There's no pleasure in my dome at the moment. No, there's no pleasure in the dome. It's very yeasty in there. I need someone to look at it, but I'm too busy talking about this film. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. So, um, yeah. You know what? And the Pleasure Dome, that's every week on SpyHards Podcast. Ah, I mean... You're all in it with us! That's right. Especially when we're tackling like, the likes of the Jigsaw Men. That is the Pleasure Dome. That is... When Charles Gray is

[00:01:35] careening a car into a group of monkeys, you know you've hit the Pleasure Dome. When you see Michael Crawford running and jumping off the Eiffel Tower and letting out a goofy scream, you know you're in the Pleasure Dome. Joe, thinking back to that moment, I'm genuinely surprised they didn't insert the Tarzan scream. Um, it was a Disney movie that used the goofy scream, so it makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:59] It's appropriate. And honestly, like, the Tarzan or the Wilhelm scream are so, like, pounded into the ground. I kind of appreciated hearing the goofy scream. That's fair. That's fair. And speaking of a goofy scream... And campy spy films... And very campy spy films. Cam, the question goes to you, as it always does. What are we talking about this week? It's Halloween, Scott. And so we need to celebrate appropriately. In the past, we've looked at The

[00:02:29] Invisible Agent, the universal horror spinoff film. We have looked at Possession. Yeah. Movie that'll definitely shake you by the lapels. I just saw it in theaters. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can talk about that in a second. Yeah. Okay. But we are going to take a look at a Blumhouse film, Megan 2.0. Now, Megan, the original horror film, Mithrigan 2.0, spy film. So it applies. So we'll talk about both films a little bit as we go forward.

[00:02:58] But you know what? It's a little bit of an offbeat choice, but one I like. I just want to set the standard, set the tone moving forward in this episode. Are we going with the Megan 2.0 or are we going with the Mark Kermode patented M3-gun? I mean, I've definitely used M3-gun before. M3-gun? Okay. I feel like M3-gun is funny the first couple times you say it. And then? And then about halfway through the episode, the listeners are just like, shut up. Well, they do that with us anyway. I've seen the retention rates as it goes, eee.

[00:03:29] But yeah, I feel like it's kind of like the joke gets old. Or maybe it's a little bit like the Sideshow Bob Rakes where... Yeah, like you just have to keep going through it and it just becomes funny again. Even on the commentary for that episode on the Simpsons DVDs, they're like, you know, we know by the time you get to the third, fourth, fifth, it's really just stupid. But by the time you get to the 10th, 11th, 12th, you're laughing again. So which are we choosing? M3-gun? I think so. Okay, M3-gun it is.

[00:03:58] Oh, right. M3-gun 2.0. And just to throw back to Possession, a film that when we spoke about it a couple of years ago, it was hard to find a copy of. And then not long after that got released on 4K on like Kino Lorber and one of those sort of reprint brands. Yeah. And now it's everywhere. And there's going to be a remake soon. Like Possession is all the craze. With Margot Qualley and Callum Turner, I think, doing it. I think so, yeah.

[00:04:26] What's the over-under on, I mean, you're going to get the subway scene. Yeah. You're absolutely going to get Margot doing that. Are we going to have the tentacle sex monster? No. I mean, the thing about Possession was that was a very offbeat, non-Hollywood film that was taking weird chances and doing very, very odd, uncomfortable things. That's not going to be this movie.

[00:04:53] But then I'll throw it back at you. Margot herself did The Substance two years ago, and that's a bit offbeat and a bit uncomfortable to watch. It is, but that's also like, I just feel like this is going to be a big enough release and probably has enough money put into it that there's going to be more opinions being cast for it. Like even The Substance, I think, is more conventional in storytelling than what Possession is doing.

[00:05:21] And it had two bona fide stars in the film, whereas Possession had Isabella O'Jani, who was an up-and-comer, and Sam Neill, who was basically not known at that point. That's right. Yeah. And so I do feel like whatever this will be, it's just unlikely to me that it's going to have the edginess or the full-on weirdness of Possession 81. But you're right. You're right. You're right. It's Halloween season. I've got a pumpkin spice latte sat here. I'm wearing a fleece. It's chilly outside.

[00:05:49] What more could you want? We're talking about a silly, scary Halloween-y Blumhouse spy movie. Do we talk a Mithrigan 2.0 first, or do we talk about Mithrigan? We talk about Mithrigan first, yeah. Okay. Well, Mithrigan's not a spy movie, so let's just do a very quick, like, what we thought of Mithrigan. I think it's important to have context before you dive into the sequel. I thought it was cute. Yeah. It's not something I usually would have gone for. I'm not a big horror guy. It's not a horror film.

[00:06:20] It's got its horror to it. It's scarier than this film is. But I enjoyed it. I liked sort of the Megan doll as a character. I thought it was an interesting concept, and I think it really had legs to go somewhere. I didn't really care for the rest of the cast in the film, but the gimmick was Megan. Dancing around and killing things, which was in all of the trailers. And yeah, you go for a 90-minute film. Bear that in mind. Megan, first one, 90 minutes.

[00:06:49] A little longer, but it's like 100 minutes. Like 95. Okay, yeah, sure. I would take the end off, whatever. Comparatively short. Yes. Yes. That's what they say about me. Not to Cam, though. I think I'm marginally taller. I slouched. I wanted to make you feel better in that photo. I'm just going to sit up here now for the rest of the episode. I'm actually 6'5". Oh, no. Hi, Scott. Just pretending to be Megan the whole time.

[00:07:19] Or Gollum. Or Gollum. I mean, I've seen you crawl across the floor of a hotel room in the dark, so I've seen the golem in you. That's a story for another day or many previous podcast episodes. But let's talk about then your thoughts on Megan. So I actually really enjoyed the first Megan. It was one that, you know, when you saw the initial marketing, it looked like it just could be trashy. Yeah. Because like Blumhouse, you know, part of their model is they will just make low-budget genre films.

[00:07:49] They'll give the directors a lot of free reign because the budget's so low that it's not hard to be profitable. Even like a quote-unquote bomb probably still makes money. Yep. And so I really appreciate their model, and I think they've actually gotten a lot of good movies out of that. They've also gotten a lot of duds. And I remember just seeing the commercials for Megan and thinking like, this is going to be like a one-joke premise. Like, I get it. You know, fine. But like, is it actually going to be any good?

[00:08:18] And then the reviews were quite strong. And so I went and saw it, and I really enjoyed it. And I think the thing is like, at trying to do a killer doll movie, I think it's one of the best there is. And people are going to point to Child's Play. And yeah, the original Child's Play is very good. You know, Bride of Chucky is fun too, in a very like meta campy way. You know, in some ways, the way that this is going, where it's like the Child's Play movies, once they started going meta and jokey,

[00:08:47] that's where suddenly people came back to them because the second and third were pretty bad. Well, didn't that happen with like the Jason films and all that sort of stuff? Like they were a bit like self-serious on the sequels, and then they just went silly. Yeah. By the time you had Jason X, Jason in space, it's definitely very silly. And you know, the Leprechauns did that as well, where they just got kind of self-knowing. Friday the 13th got a bit silly. Well, that's Jason, yeah. Nightmare on Elm Street.

[00:09:17] You're talking about Freddy Krueger? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like once you had like Freddy playing video games with people and stuff like, you know, turning their bodies into like 8-bit Nintendo characters, yeah, it got very silly. And so like, you know, I walked out of that first one really appreciating what it was doing. I could, there was issues. You could tell that they'd edited it down from an R to a PG-13. Yeah. There was some very visible or not on-screen visible cutting

[00:09:45] that you know was filmed originally, that they were just like, no, no, this movie's going to play huge with like, say pre-teens even. Let's get this into a theater so they can see it. And it worked. The movie was a huge hit. Yeah. And also like it was, I think it was like one of the main costumes of that Halloween. Yeah. Like the actual Megan character punctuated the zeitgeist and people knew about it. It was like TikTokified.

[00:10:13] There was a dance craze that came with that film. Like it, whether that's Blumhouse or their media people or just like happenstance, it did catch a wave and it did pretty good bank. Well, I'll just give the financials on that movie now. So Megan, the original, Mithrigan, cost $12 million to make, pretty low budget, domestically, it did 95.2,

[00:10:42] international 84.9 for worldwide of 180.1. I mean, that's just for reference, although this is a pretty old reference at the point of release of this video, that's the same budget as Digger. Yeah. Yeah. That it made. Yeah. And it was made for less than a tenth. Yeah. $12 million. Yeah. Yeah. That's pure profit, baby. And then that's just the theatrical. Think of the streaming.

[00:11:11] Think of people watching that movie at home. And also like revenue generated on social media through all the clips they put out and stuff like that. Like that's... Yeah. They had a runaway hit with that one. They did. And it was one where I felt like it was actually pretty deserved. Because especially like the physical performance by Amy McDonald and the voice by Jenna Davis, like the Megan character was brilliantly conceived. And we'll get into it, but you understand the filmmaker's confidence

[00:11:39] that that character could headline movies. Sure. Yeah. No, I don't deny that at all. But I think, you know, let's get into the meat and potatoes of what we're talking about, which is Mathrigan 2.0. And for those who haven't checked out Mithrigan 2.0, and I'll keep on saying that, here is your synopsis. Mathrigan 2.0. Miss me? I mean, you'd only been away for like a couple of years, but sure. After the underlying tech for Mathrigan is stolen

[00:12:08] and misused by a powerful defense contractor to create a military-grade weapon known as Amelia, Mathrigan's creator, Gemma, realizes the only option is to resurrect Mathrigan and give her a few upgrades, making her faster, stronger, and more lethal. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I mean, it's kind of missing out the whole like, I guess the spy plot's sort of in there, but there's more to this story than just they've rebuilt Mathrigan. Yeah, yeah, there is.

[00:12:37] And even like the rebuilding of Mathrigan comes... Like two scenes. Uh, it's a while. I wouldn't say... No, no. It's like there's the robot is there, and then they convince him to build her, and then she's there. Like, I know there's like her appearing in the house and stuff, but the actual like idea, the concept of rebuild her is only about two or three scenes. Yeah. And like the doll of Mathrigan, I think shows up at maybe 45 minutes into the movie. Something like that. Maybe a bit less. Yeah. It's quite a bit. Yeah.

[00:13:07] Um, okay. So I didn't see this in theaters. They stink of it. Unfortunately, for those who didn't know about this, Mathrigan wasn't... Mathrigan 2.0 wasn't as well received as Mathrigan, and I think I was caught up in the wake of that, and also like, I don't run to horror films, so it didn't do enough to grab me like the first one did. Like, Obsession this year was so big that I felt compelled to go and see it.

[00:13:37] Same with Backrooms. Yeah. I haven't seen a bunch of other things that came out this year, and you could name a bunch of horror films that have come out this year, and I haven't seen them. Yeah. Because they haven't really penetrated that popular culture and pulled me in. Mathrigan 2.0 did the same thing for me, so I have no background connection to it, but did you see it? I didn't see it in the theater, no, and I've actually held off until this show because I knew we were going to tackle it. I don't know why I didn't see it in the theater, because... It does seem weird for you. I had enjoyed the first,

[00:14:05] and the second one was... Look, it wasn't rapturously reviewed, but it got, like, I think it was like a 60% on Rotten Tomatoes kind of grade, which is not bad. Like, it's not like it was 20% where you go, okay, this thing's a stinker, stay away. It was more like it just felt like it arrived with a certain air of like, eh, it's here, and I would have to, like, go and look at the charts, and I didn't do that, but, like, it must have been a busy summer release period,

[00:14:34] and I was probably seeing other things because when I was actually, like, after watching the movie last night, I went back and looked at a lot of my film podcasts that I followed to see if I'd, you know, held onto or banked an episode on, you know, Mithrigan 2.0 that I could now go back and listen to, and there was none. Like, it's obvious that, like, whatever was going on that summer, there was a bigger release that was more interesting to all of these shows I listened to that they'd done as their main topic that week,

[00:15:02] and so I have to assume there was something big, like a big blockbuster, and Blumhouse was maybe confident that Mithrigan could compete with whatever else was coming out that was big that summer. Well, let me take a look while you're talking. Let me see if I can find out what came alongside it. But it's like, it reminds me a little bit in a way of, like, like, um, no, Furiosa got a lot of coverage, but it's that same sort of, like, sequel that's not particularly well received

[00:15:32] and just, like, doesn't grab people and goes away very quickly. And so, if I would have wanted to check out, you know, 2.0, it probably would have been almost too late. It probably wasn't even around in my theaters that long. Okay, so, around that time, you had the following films come out, and I'm talking, like, within days of this. Yeah. July 11th, so what about legs for a few weeks with Superman? Right, yeah.

[00:16:01] Two weeks later, you have Fantastic Four First Steps on July 25th, two days before Mithrigan came out. Yeah. And on home video, as in Netflix, you also had Happy Gilmore 2. And then there was probably independent films that were getting slow releases that I would have been running to. Oh, there's a couple of other films. I'm just picking the ones that I think people would have necessarily, if you're picking, like, if you only got a certain amount of time on that weekend, you picked one film, it's probably Fantastic Four, which didn't do all that well either, or Happy Gilmore 2, which did do quite well in terms of views,

[00:16:30] at least according to the Nielsen ratings. So, yeah. And if you think about the target audience for 2.0, it's like, you know, kids in their teenage years and younger, they don't have endless amounts of income to spend. Look, I'm in my 40s. They're not like, will the plus 40-year-olds show up to 2.0? Like, maybe, maybe not. But like, what they care about is younger people. And younger people have limited money. And so, you're naming some big movies there that probably were a little noisier in their marketing,

[00:17:00] especially Superman, that they were going, hey, I'm going to go pay for that one. And, you know. And they were also counter-programmed on the same day another horror film came out, which didn't do all that well either. The Home. Okay, I didn't see that. I've never seen that. No, but like, if we're talking like two horror films coming out the exact same weekend, now obviously I know Mithrigan 2.0 isn't a horror film really, but people think Mithrigan is synonymous with it. Yeah, yeah, well, exactly. And the thing was, like,

[00:17:29] the first Mithrigan got really good reviews. And so, it got people outside of that kind of younger demographic who were like, oh, I should check this out. Yeah, like you, me, you know, other people I know who are in my age bracket were like, oh, I'm going to go see this movie. And I just think too, it probably comes down to marketing when you look at like trailers for 2.0. It just, it was selling something I think that people were like,

[00:18:00] that's not kind of, even on a primal note, they aren't sitting there looking through plot specifics. They're not like, well, I don't feel like a James Bond take or something like, like, they're not thinking that. They're just probably thinking this doesn't look that fun, I don't really care. No, and I think like, actually, I'll save that for when we get into it. I have some thoughts about that. But let's get into the sort of the behind the scenes. How did we get from 1.0 to 2.0? Right. So yes, the original Megan

[00:18:29] or Mathrigan was a movie that was obviously a Blumhouse film, as I said, but it was also produced by James Wan and co-written as well. Now, James Wan runs the Atomic Monster slate and is also a director that's very big. He did, you know, Furious 7. He's done the Aquaman films, but he's also a genre guy. He did Saw. Saw is what put him on the map and then he produced the other Saw films and built a whole little cottage industry of horror

[00:18:58] and he's become a horror director. He did The Conjuring, the first two movies. He's, you know, worked on the Insidious films. Everything you think of that's like kind of these almost like, you know, haunted house kind of things, he's probably responsible or has his hand in, whether on a producer capacity, directing some of these films. He works with Lee Wannell a lot who, you know, Lee Wannell, the co-star of Saw who has since directed like the Invisible Man remake, the Wolfman remake

[00:19:28] from a couple years ago. So those guys kind of have like cornered the market in a way on horror. That's kind of like their brand. And so James Wan had co-written the original Mithrigan with Akella Cooper and Universal had seen that film obviously as they're working through it and seeing dailies and then seeing rough cuts and they were really into it and saying like we want a sequel to this. And so even before

[00:19:57] Mithrigan was released they were going you know we think we have potential here but it did take a little bit longer. So let's get to the director and co-writer of this film Gerard Johnstone who directed the first Mithrigan but did not write it. He has a both story and screenplay on this movie. He has sole screenwriting credit on the movie. He's a New Zealand born screenwriter, producer, and director. I just want to

[00:20:27] just mention quickly James Wan is Australian and so likes to bring a lot of talent over from Australia and I think as well New Zealand. And so that's kind of like been kind of one of his missions along the way. And so yes Johnstone is from New Zealand as I said. He got his start on the New Zealand sitcom The Jackie Brown Diaries in 2008. Worked on that for a couple years writing and directing episodes. He wrote and directed a 2014

[00:20:55] indie horror comedy called Housebound. Went back to TV for a little bit and then directed the first Mithrigan film. And this is his follow-up to that movie. And this is also his first entry point in this franchise writing the movies. And I've looked at just kind of what he's got coming up. It's interesting because like we'll talk about box office on this movie in a second but like you know there's not going to be probably a 3.0 off of this movie.

[00:21:26] And he's actually moving on Universal I think. You think? We'll get to the box office in a second. But Okay we'll come back to this. We'll come back to that. So like Johnstone currently Universal loves him and they've snapped him up to tackle the Mattel film Monster High. And I know Monster High is something that's well in the background for me. Like I'm too old for it. But I do a lot or used to do a lot of cake decorating. Right. And I can tell you Monster High was a big deal. It's sort of like

[00:21:56] Barbie with like Universal monster archetypes like Dracula and Frankenstein kind of stuff. I will quickly Google this because I've never heard of it. It feels very North American. You might recognize the art because you might have seen kids wearing the shirts or what have you because it's the kind of thing that I don't really know what it is but I recognize the characters just from seeing a lot of kids into this stuff. So he may have like a guaranteed hit on his hands or he could have the next coming of Bratz. I don't know.

[00:22:26] I mean I don't think I've ever seen these in my life but I understand what they are. Yeah. Yeah. You get it. Yeah. I'm a Barbie girl. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. John you won't be dressing up for the Monster High opening night. I mean Life in Plastic is fantastic but yeah I'll stick to my pink thanks. Well they need to open Monster High opposite the new Christopher Nolan film when that comes out. Oh just so you can have another Barbenheimer. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know what that movie will be so we

[00:22:56] can't even make a joke. You can't because you don't know what either film is necessarily called. Yeah it's like if it had been the Odyssey you could call it like the modesty but we can't do that. Oh very good. Very good. Make a shirt out of that Sean Longmore. I know you're watching. So he said of the success of the first movie he said you know Mithrigan held so much promise and I felt there was so many ideas and situations I wanted to apply to that character and he also said later in that interview that he was

[00:23:25] really interested in AI themes which is interesting because I think a lot of people who really enjoyed the first Mithrigan film you know really were into kind of the doll horror of it all and like the comedy too like the scenes where she's singing for example or the dancing like they really like that stuff because it's fun and poppy but I think it was like the horror angle that grabbed people and when you had the ending of that movie for those that don't remember Megan or Mithrigan is like kind of tapped into the

[00:23:55] like Alexa or whatever of the house and that was kind of the teaser for what could happen and I think a lot of people thought okay this is going to be another horror sequel where she's come back to you know scare this family again but clearly for him it was the AI thing that was really really interesting and that is I mean if we're talking prescient topics yeah hot button topic then when he probably put this film together still a hot button topic now we are

[00:24:25] seemingly one minute on the verge of penetrating to the point of where AI is going to kill us all never quite know where we are with this so yeah I understand why you'd want to talk about it but necessarily was that the thing everyone else wanted to talk about yeah that's the interesting question because I can totally see how the character is a doorway to that discussion and using genre to tackle that yeah but it's the question of like is

[00:24:55] that what people responded to with the first yeah I'm not sure it is yeah so this also has a story no go ahead well there's a there's I read the I read a quote from I think one of the producers one of the Blumhouse producers about like how they thought Mithrigan could do anything I have got that quote so I'll read that in a little bit yeah yeah okay well I mean that's kind of the point I want to talk about I think that's me a really interesting point do you want to talk about that later or talk about it now

[00:25:25] that's in the reception part of it yeah we'll get to that we'll get to that yeah so this also had a story credit by the the writer of the original or co-writer of the original Akella Cooper who had started out writing in TV on shows like Tron Opera Tron Uprising Grim the 100 and Luke Cage and then wrote the 2018 amusement park horror film Hellfest which I believe was like an indie horror film very gory and then

[00:25:53] wrote Malignant for James Wan to direct under the Atomic Monster banner in 2021 now Malignant was released kind of during the pandemic it was a movie that got kind of quiet response at the time it seemed like just another James Wan sort of horror film in the mold of something like The Conjuring but people have really discovered it in the years since because it's absolutely insane and has a huge twist that no one ever sees coming like in a good way

[00:26:22] in a good way yeah Malignant has become something of a cult favorite in the years since its release okay so yeah and then basically after working with James Wan there jumps over and does Mithrigan right after that so and at this point Akella Cooper's in the in the Atomic Monster kind of stable of writers because they also wrote The Nun 2 as well for for

[00:26:51] Atomic Monster okay yeah and then basically jumped over to Mithrigan after The Nun 2 and Akella Cooper is also a writer co-producer on season one of Star Trek Strange New Worlds Red Alert really season one yeah bailed after season one yeah bailed after season one maybe that was the secret sauce bailed bailed after Akiva Goldsman turned up and thought this is my show now and ruined everything

[00:27:20] yeah no but Akiva Goldsman's there season one no no no they said they didn't pay attention to it as much and he went and wanted to take the reins of season two oh interesting I've read that in many interviews okay well yes so he was dealing with Discovery I think or Picard one of the two and then went over and did that it was Picard season two yeah yeah okay well pour one out pour one out it's all starting to make sense isn't it folks yeah yeah and so

[00:27:49] the primary inspirations for this movie other than the AI angle on it uh-huh was um according this is according to Gerard John Stone Terminator 2 I think that one's fairly clear and then also Evil Dead uh two and three because uh I can see well he cited Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness as being very important because of the fact they were willing to change genres like

[00:28:17] Evil Dead 3 you know Army of Darkness is like a medieval comedy yeah and the idea of just like taking that character of Ash played by Bruce Campbell and just dumping him in different types of situations and having fun with that and different types of genres that was a huge movie that he uh two movies that he was looking at and suddenly you go you know well we'll talk about it going forward but like I can understand the impulse I this is actually the thing I want to talk about I mean I want to talk

[00:28:47] about the film but the genre hopping is the most important thing and most interesting thing about this entire film yeah um but you that's that quote you want to bring up so why don't we get to that okay so uh this movie had a budget of around 25 million dollars um there's never been a concrete number on that one but around 25 double the first double the first uh which makes sense given the earnings of the first um and they he apparently johnson said they wanted to go big blockbuster sure um and so that's why they got a

[00:29:15] little more money uh although compared to other blockbusters this is nothing uh so yes 25 million dollar budget domestically it did 24.1 international 15 for a worldwide total of 39.1 it died overseas didn't it like if it had done like another 25 overseas you could have been like well we made some money but even 24 domestically is very poor for a horror film or well well non-horror film but you know what i mean a sequel to a very popular horror

[00:29:45] film to do that amount of money is very very very poor yeah yeah so uh it landed number 88 for the year uh between bring her back which is a very visceral intense horror film and companion which is actually thematically almost the same it's like uh that's a jack quaid film about like a uh friend of the show jack quaid let's give him credit that's right yeah yeah yeah about like a uh synthetic uh character so i actually enjoyed that film i thought companion was

[00:30:15] great honestly i really i watched it on a plane because i didn't see it in the theater and i was like this movie's really really good i watched it on a plane too did you it's a classic plane movie it's it's such a great it's a good companion for your flight but i would say the quality of the movie is far better than a plane movie what a joke what a joke but i would say the quality of that movie is far better than a plane movie but i would say it's not benefited by seeing it on a big screen agreed yeah which i feel a lot about a

[00:30:42] lot of horror films yeah right so the top three for the year number one was niza 2 which was a chinese animated fantasy epic which earned 2.3 billion dollars yeah that one was on top of the charts whole year round that was uh well when it came out but yeah yeah there was no chance anyone else was getting near that no number two was zootopia 2 which did 1.9 billion and uh number three was avatar fire and

[00:31:10] ash which did which did 1.5 you think people think that like avatar 3 was a failure but like 1.5 billion still pretty good i know james cameron's like we're gonna have to slash that budget on the next one these things aren't performing anymore i might not even do four or five someone else might do it like bro you just made like a collective like 6 million 6 billion on your films you're okay it's just like james cameron just wants james cameron dollars like huge mega mega earners he wants to be number one all the time and

[00:31:40] it's like dude you can't be putting out avatar 4 and expecting like the returns of 1 and 2 i wanted to just go that spielberg route of like okay do the old commercial film but do some weird things yeah like and i don't mean a billy eilish documentary well he's uh he wants i don't know if he's gonna do it but he's currently attached to do a movie about hiroshima so i because he bomb the hiroshima bomb black guys like a doll's eyes a doll like

[00:32:09] mithrigan like a doll's eyes yeah yeah and so because he said that um oppenheimer uh he called oppenheimer a cowardly film and he says he's going to correct that with i think it's called ghosts of hiroshima okay buddy you you go make it make it so yeah yeah uh so after this movie uh tanked uh jason blum was doing the press rounds and basically said we all

[00:32:36] thought uh mc uh we all thought mithrigan was like superman we could do anything to her that sounds iffy uh we could change genres we could put her in the summer we could make her look different we could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy and we classically overthought how powerful people's engagement was with her that's a great quote and a very self-aware quote i appreciate that yeah that's why it jumped out to me when i was doing my small bit of research for this recording and i think like i mean let's

[00:33:06] just talk about the genre hopping we'll come back to it but i think that is the thing with this yeah and i think they fundamentally missed a step and by step i mean sequel right because i understand the army of darkness evil dead 2 comparison but look at like other franchises um that tend to maybe go elsewhere and stray a bit more i was thinking actually uh gremlins gremlins 2 gremlins 2 which is just full blown like looney tunes cartoon but they're

[00:33:34] like but gremlins 2 is parodying sequels yeah it's barely a gremlins film yeah um i i assume gremlins 3 is gonna go full meta and just be a gremlins film again well it's i would assume it's gonna be closer to the original yeah well it's chris columbus isn't it it is i think it's gonna be he because he wrote the original gremlins and i think it's gonna be more in the spirit of kind of like yeah you know amblin family horror movie nostalgia blah blah yeah skip please i'll stick to

[00:34:02] gremlins 2 my point being is i feel like they needed a couple more just straight megan films mithrigan films before you went to this they've they basically made t2 meets mission impossible was why i wrote down yeah um and that's fine but i don't think this should have been the second film i think you needed a couple more to make the mithrigan character more teflon so you could do more things with her unfortunately like i'm not getting into the quality of the

[00:34:32] film but i think they really missed the point of just being like let's just change everything no no people liked what you did let's have more i agree i agree and i think like people really enjoyed like the menace of um megan as well and by taking that away i think it was just like you needed like a bridge movie the one that maybe does play a little more in a different genre maybe sci-fi um you know although like now i'm thinking did you ever see you probably didn't but happy death day

[00:35:02] no but i'm aware of that and it's equal so like happy death day is like a comedy slasher film right and really good one actually and really fun and then they were like okay happy death day you know was a big enough hit let's make a sequel to that and so they reunited and instead of like kind of bringing back the slasher kind of stuff that people really liked they made it a time travel sci-fi movie right and like that wasn't what

[00:35:31] the audience wanted they'd loved happy death day and it's like i get it that you don't want to repeat yourself and i appreciate that these filmmakers aren't repeating themselves that you know even though they're making like you know genre films for atomic monster or what have you or blumhouse um they are saying you know what i want to try something different and that's great that the low budget allows them that but at the same time the audience is showing up to kind of get what they loved from

[00:35:59] the first one even though you can you can change the package but you can't change it too much no um i just think like well we both just said exactly what the problem is here but i i just think why on earth did they want to push so far away from something that worked i know i know and like in every other universe i can hear the online discourse and maybe some people replying to this like saying everyone always wants them to change things push the boundaries and then they

[00:36:29] do it and they said oh it's too far yeah i mean like look at the digger discourse from when that film came out i know i'm not sure if you've seen it at the point of recording or not so i won't get into anything about the film but like the discourse around digger is it it just goes too far and pushes people away yeah um i watched it and i thought well this is an interesting take on things i i i appreciated it being different but it wasn't a sequel yeah yeah um and it you you can genre hop all you want if you have an

[00:36:58] established set of things let's actually i figured out here's the analogy red alert you know we love doing it star trek yeah okay pick a show next generation seven seasons 24 episodes per season give or take you are given plenty of time to see the characters in a normal stable environment and then once or twice a season you get a weird story they're they're you know with robin hood they're playing dress up on the

[00:37:28] holodeck yeah they're in a sherlock holmes thing like that's there too to give you a bit of a break from everything else but you like the main bit you like the 22 of the 24 episodes but then the other two are just a bit of a side relief unfortunately they've gone one episode and then to the other weird one immediately we haven't had enough time to get established that we like this and so you've given us the thing that we don't like clearly and so i think they've i think they probably have sunk their chances for a sequel

[00:37:56] and also you know it's funny you mentioned next generation because the second episode was like a wacky the characters are drunk on space phenomena episode and like that's considered a terrible episode bingo and people didn't know the characters at that point like they were not comfortable enough yeah like it's hard to play like drunk or an altered state against something we're not able to compare to now me and you watching it now have seen next generation a bazillion times it's funny to watch but in 1987 the second week of third week of september when that episode aired that would have been like what the hell is this

[00:38:26] yeah exactly and you know the thing is i want to note too army of darkness gremlins 2 happy death day 2 none of them were hits cult hits some of them it's like clearly you know some of them were i think maybe well actually i would say all three of them were reclaimed over time and had cult audiences that really appreciate especially gremlins 2 actually an army of darknesses 2 those two happy death day 2 is liked by a lot of people but it's it's probably still too

[00:38:54] fresh it's too fresh yeah the other two are legitimate cult classics um but uh that took time and cult classic does not equal big hit on the big screen nope yeah and so it's kind of like i think a little faulty to pursue that model at least in terms of like we want this to be a hit movie in the theater especially the thing we should note as well about the sequel was that they opened it in the midst of the summer against blockbusters whereas the original july 25th against

[00:39:24] fantastic fall yeah whereas the original was like a quieter time of year where they were like okay you know what there's nothing much going on put this movie out no um yeah it it it just feels like a crazy move um and if i never thought i would call for this if there was ever a moment where like studio execs should have interfered yeah it was here well i mean yeah i mean when you have like um you know jason blum who's running the studio blumhouse

[00:39:53] after the fact yeah well but he obviously was on board because he was thinking no yeah we can do this this is a good idea so it's like yeah it was just like one of those cases where a different opinion would probably have been the right one the one going up against this in terms of like success it would have been a less interesting like take yeah perhaps uh interesting is a loose term but like formulaic maybe reviewers at the time were like oh this i've seen this it

[00:40:23] was the first megan film blah blah blah but i think a lot of people were turned up for a megan 2 that felt like a lot like the first one i mean it's not a horror movie but look at hangover 2 huge hit that's the same movie even 3 was too 3 was the same movie yeah yeah both uh 2 and 3 are pretty much the same movie now with them it is a couple of final notes uh or just one final note actually did you know there was a uh uh spin-off of this movie that came out

[00:40:54] as in a third film a spin-off but a third movie in the matrigan universe came out in august no so there was a movie called soulmate uh-huh uh with the with the number eight in there um that was released on august 1st and it was produced by james wan atomic monster film and it was made and intended to be released sort of in the wake of 2.0

[00:41:22] and really like bask in the glory and the success of 2.0 and then when uh 2.0 pretty much tanked they quietly just released it to streaming it was supposed to be a theatrical film though i'm just looking at it now okay and it's sort of it's sort of the uh it's it's like the sex bot version of the matrigan story it's companion yeah basically it's companion yeah

[00:41:49] wow i mean i i thought i thought you were going the other way around where they'd done another film and just loosely tied it on like the cloverfield paradox right no no no it was intended to be okay and which was fascinating to me because i know you don't follow horror stuff very strongly but like i do pay attention to what's going on in horror i was not aware of soulmate has it got anything for us to deal with uh no no it's it's more actually um i think inspired by like uh

[00:42:15] those sort of erotic thrillers of the past like fatal attraction and stuff okay yeah any more for us no that wraps it up on uh 2.0 so uh yeah on with the review let's get to the review yeah it's about time meat sack let's get to it mithrigan 2.0 uh i'll start because you've been talking for a while yes go for it sit back kids spooky time

[00:42:44] this should have been a silly schlocky 90 minute sequel with a bit more gore and a bit more fun and a bit more tongue-in-cheek and a bit more of mithrigan and instead i just and i've said it like i just think the the genre completely misses the point and what you end up unfortunately is the genre here is spy movies yeah and unfortunately they're not very good at writing those so you end up with 120 minutes of confusing talking with the odd bit of mithrigan action

[00:43:14] and that does not make for a successful sequel or a fun watch don't get me wrong there were moments in here i enjoyed there were mithrigan bits like the i mean i got a quite a bit of a laugh out of the woman's work kate bush song sure yeah coming out that that tickled me more than it should have because it is like that sort of like stereotypical song and allison williams actually said she kept like dying laughing trying to film that i can only imagine that was hilarious and that came through on screen

[00:43:44] because that was fun but the plot of this isn't fun the story isn't fun the characters aren't fun apart from mithrigan uh they just completely missed the mark it's it's remarkable really i think it goes to show that really what mithrigan original was completely accidental lightning in a bottle moment that just that could not be replicated and i don't think we're ever going to get that again that's probably why we're going to get a third film but

[00:44:15] it just lost its identity and it lost its fun yeah i think that's why people went to the first one because it looked fun and it was and this isn't fun and yet i would say it's trying far harder than the first one did to be fun in caps sure like like a waka waka aren't i funny kind of way yeah like the first one knew that it was like funny because like the the song performance and the um you know

[00:44:45] the the dancing and what have you like you whether it was like they realized that those were going to be big crowd pleasing moments or they just kind of like happened into them and were like oh oh people really like this and you get like blown up versions of those here where you get a longer dance sequence you also get a uh longer song performance as well um but like it was like a really effective horror film punctuated by funny moments

[00:45:14] that's really the first one which a lot of horror films sort of rely on these days yeah it's that pressure valve thing right like you know let the audience laugh to kind of relieve their tension at key moments when do we do that never it's all tension all the time here on spy hearts it's one of those shows folks is there is it's very serious here on spy hearts there is no fun to be had if you're watching the youtube scob is scott is waving a pen right now as he says it like he's means business i'm prostrating you all

[00:45:43] you should not be having fun with this episode this is serious discussion i could name some other shows but i'm not going to do it angry english school teacher scott right now i'm i if i had a ruler or or a border razor i'd throw it at the screen and wrap your knuckles yeah exactly yeah um yeah it's like that movie was punctuated by humor whereas like this one feels like a group of like creatives going

[00:46:12] we're hilarious we know we're hilarious you guys we've got this and yeah and i gotta be honest there's a lot of quips in this movie very few of them made me laugh mm-hmm and that's not great um that's not great at all because like this movie in a way it's almost doing like a austin powers 2 where you had the the first austin powers was this like kind of sleeper hit which is like

[00:46:41] very clever and smart and has great set pieces and iconic comedic moments and then the second one they're like oh my god people have like just eaten this movie up on home video we gotta go big and like repeat the same things blow them out and just like really just dive deep into what you know people thought was funny in the first and it feels like that's kind of the attitude they had here and these are not mike myers and his team writing this movie

[00:47:11] yeah jay roach is not directing this film it's not great comedy writers writing this film uh and i think that's a huge problem and it's a movie that like i i didn't enjoy watching a lot of this movie i found it really dragged out it's two hours and like two hours is not a test for a lot of movies a two hour mission impossible movie is a blessing at this point in time a two hour james bond movie is a blessing at this point

[00:47:41] but like there's something about taking this premise this character who lives in like kind of a very poppy fast-paced world to a degree and then stretching that over two hours i found it almost torturous by the time i was getting to the end i watched it last night after coming i did like a dinner with friends got home around nine and was watching this movie and i was like nodding off in the last half hour and i like snapped to rewound and watched everything

[00:48:11] that i you know missed but it was like that should not be happening in this movie this should be like a bolt of electricity of like this is a fun movie this is a movie you get together with your friends you put on and everyone's laughing and having fun for like a fast-paced 95 minutes or whatever um like the first it's it's not it's like it's um almost like numbing to a degree where it wants to do the spy story which i would argue if you're trying to appeal to young people

[00:48:40] um i would say that spy entertainment not really grabbing the uh gen z's these days stop pointing at our listeners and viewers cam i'm just saying um i i love you cam doesn't love me he wishes you were younger i i wish i was younger i would me too me too but like i i feel like um you're not getting a lot of like 15 or 14 year olds now who are dying

[00:49:09] to see james bond riffs or mission impossible riffs you know what i mean it's like oh you mean those mission impossible films why do i starring like a 60 something year old man like i'm 18 or 15 what do i care yeah that's my dad's entertainment like why why in this movie are we basically sending up or having fun with kids like parents entertainment like i think it's a very poor decision and i would be more defending it if they pulled it off

[00:49:39] if they had delivered like a top tier entertaining spy caper that was like fast paced and fun i would have zero complaints it may not be successful but i'd be like you know what like honestly mathrigan as a franchise i'd like to see her in other types of genres now maybe this really works but this movie i i don't hate it at all i'm actually kind of like i appreciate that it's ambitious and trying for things and i think on a production level

[00:50:09] it looks great a lot it looks much better than the first one yeah like the money is on the screen and they didn't have a lot of money but you know they've got a select number of locations they could work with you know and a lot of them are interiors but like they make this movie look really good through lighting through practical effects all that sort of stuff so like a couple like visually arresting becuase sequences in like a disco and stuff that look pretty nice or the corridor and things like that like they look pretty good yeah the action looks great like i have zero complaints

[00:50:39] whatsoever in terms of a you know a product in terms that i'm watching it's made professionally and it's made well but it just doesn't hold together and ultimately it's not fun to watch no um i had one of the touchstone films people mentioned for this is t2 yeah and i was thinking about it afterwards like because t2 does the same thing in many ways it takes the character that was the villain makes him a good guy and brings in a bigger

[00:51:08] tougher villain to try and kill them plus the characters from the first film more or less and it's much longer too it's about half an hour longer mm-hmm t2 is arguably better than the terminator yeah uh i'm not going to fight you online folks so people do actually prefer the terminator i prefer t2 hey they both exist let's enjoy both of them but i was trying to figure out like what worked about t2 versus what doesn't work with

[00:51:37] mithrigan 2.0 right and i think one of the biggest things that this film has this film down isn't the terminator character the terminator character still remains cool um there is more of the terminator in t2 than we get in mithrigan in this film yeah but what i think the biggest fall falling down this film is and i'm actually not blaming it on the actress is the villain i do not think they are interesting at all no um and then

[00:52:07] you're basically told pretty early on that they're no match for mithrigan whereas the good the kind of interesting about the terminator is he was being hunted down by a version of the terminator that's like a hundred times better than he is and visually a at the time something people had never really seen they'd seen like the water creature in the abyss but this was not the sort of thing that people were used to seeing uh like a villain do that shape shifting i don't need the i mean the cg stuff is cool of course in t2 and it still looks great now like yeah

[00:52:37] good work but i just mean like the idea of being hunted down by a predator that is better than the predator that was hunting them down in the first one is interesting plus the characters are fun to be around and the original villain is interesting and is there for the most of the film mithrigan poor villain i'm putting my hands up for those listening audibly mithrigan poor villain um conceptually conceptually a poor villain but also conceptually a poor other villain like this organization that's sort of

[00:53:07] doing all this it sort of the turns out to be the the lead female's boyfriend christian christian kelsepree um so that's boring um you don't get enough mithrigan which is kind of the title character that you're here for uh and so and then the rest of the characters aren't interesting either like i mean just looking down the list i'll just run it through uh mithrigan great uh caddy is kind of fun played by violent mccraw

[00:53:37] but not a lot uh i i don't want to use the hate word because i think that's very strong i am not a fan of alison williams's performance in this film i think she's incredibly flat and awkward i i think there's like a problem where like alison williams was also a producer on this film okay and it's been like very good in other things uh i've seen her in girls she's great in girls get out is incredible um good in that too yeah good in the first mithrigan too but it's like the problem is

[00:54:06] i don't in terms of the physical stuff like there's some you know physical robot suit kind of stuff going on or whatever that's fine like she does that well physically but like this is a caper film that like it's sort of a blend of james bond mission impossible and heist films yeah and you're seeing her in these situations where it's like oceans 11 or whatever yeah where it's like okay put on like a dress look like a million bucks and go and like you know get him embroiled with this like billionaire played by um germain clement who i actually

[00:54:36] thought was pretty funny um but like uh the movie doesn't give her fun things to do at all i guess there are a ton of exposition a ton of exposition and a lot of it's her just like standing and watching things happen yeah and it's like okay so this character is kind of boring now but also like a lot of the hook of the first one was like she's the aunt of the katie character the young girl and it's about this like having to kind of take over as a mother

[00:55:05] but not knowing how to yeah and learning those skills and that's like a big strength with the first one and this movie is all talking it's people talking about being parents people being like oh i wasn't there all that kind of stuff but there's nothing being shown i never felt any warmth whatsoever in the relationship between her and katie at all and that's a huge problem because it should be that katie is sort of torn between this like you know this kind of like difficult relationship

[00:55:35] with her aunt and the appeal of mithrigan and that doesn't work like that that's like feels like it's broken here and so kind of the emotional core of the movie is gone which means you have to rely on do you feel something for alison williams telling you about parenting no i don't care i was i was talking to a very good friend of mine earlier about this film and i was i looked up an interview of alison williams i didn't get to look at it but i saw that she'd done an interview

[00:56:05] um i can't remember i think it was new york times about uh parenting via ai in the publicity for this film yeah interesting concept and an interesting thing to talk about and you know it is a bit of an epidemic around the world pandemic i suppose it's the proper term because it's pan the world um of kids and screen time and ai and all this sort of stuff just look at toy story 5 yep just spoke about it and i think it did a lot better than this film did not by a ton though i thought toy story 5 was a

[00:56:34] little disappointing i actually prefer it to 4 i i will defend 5 yeah 4 is funnier so i tend i i side with that with a little more for that reason i think 5 was trying for something if you're going to do a fifth toy story film take a take a swing right that's this is it like it's the fifth one do something weird but jesse is the main character i don't mind yeah yeah woody and buzz have had theirs this is the second toy story and the second toy story did not make it about the dinosaur right can you imagine that movie rex thank you yeah uh yeah so

[00:57:04] anyway you know what like the second toy story did was just like okay so like woody and buzz woody's like kind of the uh the protagonist buzz is the antagonist they kind of like shifted a little bit more in the second one where suddenly buzz was more of a protagonist that's a very subtle shift that's very effective but also like in keeping with the story because they became friends at the end of the first one exactly but it's also bridging like so that's how you do the sequel where like maybe you shift the dynamics a little more but you don't like go

[00:57:34] whole hog into a completely different genre and throw your characters into situations they feel like they don't fit into like do the amazing spider-man route and have the spy plot running underneath for a couple of films and then do your spy film sure yeah by all means i mean don't do the amazing spider-man films for god's sake don't don't ever don't ever i know everyone loves to defend andrew garfield and his and and he's fine yeah those films are the worst spider-man films by far by far uh let's let's just change the tone for a second i want to get

[00:58:04] some likes out there because i do have way more dislikes to talk about but there are some things to appreciate and i i mean i i still think uh amy donald mathregan the character the concept the idea works i think it works and i think that's the only thing if they said there was gonna be a mathregan yeah get it yeah i get it i get it yeah three good why do i yeah well um and you know that i would sorry you know the fourth one would have a four in

[00:58:33] place of the a in megan uh yeah there it is mathregan or whatever but whatever that is mark commode's uh having an aneurysm somewhere thinking about this sorry buddy mathregan forn sure yeah let us know in the comments folks how would you pronounce it because i can't figure it out but right so uh you completely derailed me cam what was my point i can't i can't pronounce mathregan in my head

[00:59:02] mathregan you said if they were to do a part three oh i i could understand that they would do it because the character is a hook as a hook to it there is something interesting about the character that i would like to see more of just not in this setting yeah i didn't feel when i got to the end of this movie that the the lead character the title character was like boring and worn out no um i thought like there was still enough pop there that

[00:59:31] you're like okay you know what you could do something else with this character but i don't know that turning the character into this sort of like quipping hero was a great idea i i think like there should always be like a level of menace and distrust to the character and yes the allison williams character is consistently suspicious but you also have like mathregan constantly saying like i am here to protect katie katie's in danger

[00:59:59] i am programmed to you know save her and prevent her from being killed by this you know amelia bot and so it's like i mean i i believe that character because that logically makes sense yeah it's really just the allison williams character squabbling with her and being like no i think you're you know going to deceive us you're going to do something horrible you killed four people last time

[01:00:28] but honestly like i kind of believed mathregan more than i believe the you know the gemma character she didn't in the first one she gave some very good examples as to why she wasn't to be trusted yeah in this one she doesn't she follows the rules completely yeah and does she step out of the bounds at any point i don't think she kills anyone she's not supposed to uh she threatens a few people but it's also like i can understand the filmmakers problem where it's a little

[01:00:57] bit like the shark from jaws where like the first movie is teasing the shark teasing the shark you know you see a fin you see like you know like just bits and pieces of that shark um you know like before you get like the big reveal with the we're going to need a bigger boat and then the audience is like oh my god look at that shark and so like they kind of did that a little bit with the first film where like the menace was often the kind of thing where something would happen and they'd look and you know megan would be sitting

[01:01:26] still like just blank and so it was more like trying to read into what was going on with this with this robot yeah but like the the rabbits out of the hat now we know who this character is so it's kind of like you can't go back to the surprise and jaws 2 was showing that shark right up front and it has far less tension than the first movie does and here i understand why they're like we can't build mystery around

[01:01:55] this character anymore people know who megan is so like this was the road they chose to go down but like i just don't i feel like it would have been more interesting if megan had been like the enemy agent or something like megan was corrupted and taken over and yes we know up front that like um the character is you know obviously being is evil being driven by evil people and maybe it's fighting against its own programming to a degree like maybe that's more of a

[01:02:24] compelling angle on the character but i just think going quipping hero was a very poor decision and it's not fun well it's back to t2 again yeah he's doing far more one-liners in t2 than the terminator is in the first one mm-hmm um but it's arnold arnold is just inherently lovable sure but like the people quite like miss reagan as a character yeah i think i think they would be willing to love her um just not in this setting but i gave a like come on you've got to give one too

[01:02:53] uh so my likes i mean the character for sure i said the production value i think this movie looks great and we look at so many movies that look like garbage that cost far more money than this and we were talking in our mayday episode about how mayday actually looked better than a lot of the streaming spy movies we tackle on this show um dodgy cg aside sometimes um but like you know in that episode i brought

[01:03:21] up the odyssey and said like you know the odyssey is shot under very special circumstances um you know with the imax cameras and christopher nolan knowing knowing no lining how to use uh those imax cameras to the best of their ability at this point in his career so like it's not fair to say all movies should look like the odyssey but no you'd hope they'd look halfway as good and they don't a lot of them look far worse i look at this movie which has none of the resources that christopher nolan would

[01:03:51] have at his disposal and this movie looks good the the lighting is consistently fun it's you know the purples and pinks i think like they take the character of mithrigan when they present her in different ways like when she's like going into that club party reveal like you know product reveal kind of party it's like looks great like it's creating like iconic images from a movie no one's gonna care

[01:04:18] about but they're going they're doing their best to make the movie look really good so that you can take those clips and put them on tiktok or whatever else and uh you know what they're gonna like stand out from the pack so like i really do i mean i gotta say like gerard johnstone who as i said did not write the first movie but wrote this one maybe in terms of the creative journey of the character his finger wasn't on the pulse of what the audience

[01:04:46] wanted but as a filmmaker as a director whose job it is to make scenes look good yeah i think like he really did a good job and i think like i agree you know him working with his cinematographer clearly like they they knew what they were doing yeah i literally my second like is cinematography i think i think it looks much better than the first one and like i can understand why people would want to see this on the big screen

[01:05:14] they didn't but i can understand why they might want to and the action scenes which you're gonna you know suddenly incorporate a lot more action scenes i thought they were pretty fun and creative i thought when allison williams was like you know bonding with uh with mithrigan and letting mithrigan control her body to like perform action uh it remit it reminded me of a movie that actually lee one l directed called upgrade um he did a very similar thing where um that movie is fantastic for those that haven't seen it if you want to

[01:05:44] see like a sci-fi action movie that's just like a ton of fun low budget but like no really like lives in its world the way that something like this does upgrade is pretty top tier stuff it's so much fun but that also had like a guy being taken over by ai and his body movements are being controlled by that ai and so it's like they're doing fun things with real physical performance and i felt like this movie it doesn't hit

[01:06:13] the heights of upgrade but it's still having fun in that same way and i was like you know what like i'm not super into story-wise what this movie is doing right now but i can take a moment and say i appreciate like those allison williams fight scenes i appreciate that they're doing weird things and you know because uh you know the girl that performs megan um amy donald is a dancer yeah and you can tell that like there are physical performers whether with dancing backgrounds or martial arts

[01:06:43] backgrounds or what have you um and i believe um ivana uh sakno who plays amelia who was also the villain in the spy who dumped me uh i believe she was a dancer too i think she was a russian ballet dancer she was and that was actually my third like so i'll just jump on it for a second go for it yeah ivana sakno sakno um is is great with what she's given um she is able to be like she's got the whole

[01:07:10] like sex pot thing down but also she looks like a physical threat the fight scenes are mostly her by the looks of it like i don't see a lot of stunting on that one she clearly can handle herself um and i think given some more meat on the bone perhaps to be made to be more of a threat than she is yeah i think she'd be a bit more memorable uh but i don't think that's down to the actress and i think she's also really great in a show i didn't really like uh ahsoka um which she's in as well i didn't like that show but she was good in it

[01:07:40] um and we enjoyed her in the spy who dumped me she played like an assassin in that one and was quite memorable in the film so it's good to see her back on spy hearts one more and she can be a on the patreon and it also doesn't look like they've just because like the thing about uh matrigan is like she very much conjures up sort of the image of like a like a like a tween a doll like a doll but like also like a tween age kind of character right like maybe she's like 13 or 14 or something like that and you could just read that onto

[01:08:08] this artificial construct and i think like um that the amelia character also feels that way and it doesn't feel like a 30 year old character you know trying to stand opposite uh you know the uh megan character and feeling like two different things they feel like they're very much from the same mold even though one is very much a real performer whereas there's a lot of latex and makeup and all that burying um amy donald

[01:08:36] yeah i just think she's a lot of fun but like that was my quick like did you have any other ones um i maybe you like you kind of cringed when i mentioned it earlier but i actually thought jermaine clement was fun in his small role you're reacting badly yeah like um i thought like his kind of take on like the skeezy elon musk billionaire tech billionaire guy he just had funny moments i liked him in the uh the uh like the motorized chair that keeps like bumping into things and like he's very good at playing pretentious and full of himself

[01:09:07] i i enjoyed his like small performance i think you just saw a lot of yourself in him i did i did we interrupt this program to bring you a special report agent we don't expect you to talk we expect you to buy a subscription to our patreon yee that's right over on the spy hearts patreon we're covering all your favorite spy tv shows as well as popular films from the most iconic secret agent actors of all time

[01:09:36] cam why don't you share some intel on our latest assignment well scott as you might be able to tell from my voice i've caught a virus which is appropriate because this week we are tackling the 2013 zombie outbreak film world war z starring brad pitt and directed by mark forster over a decade since its release does this horror thriller hold up or does it lack brains brains tune in and find out so deactivate

[01:10:04] ghost protocol and visit patreon.com slash spy hearts to truly do things angel style but before we close channel d on with the spy jinx dislikes we seem to have plenty of them uh i've spoken about the t2 comparison i've spoken about the ai thing failing i i listen we're spy hearts let's talk about the spy plot

[01:10:31] yeah it's very confusing it's so confusing i had to go and read the wikipedia page yeah and i'm still not entirely sure what happened and i'm not i mean this is a 250 or odd review we've watched a lot of spy movies on this show i'm pretty sure i can say in front of a judge i'm an expert in spy movies sure right i yeah i think i think we could get away with that right i think a judge would be like

[01:10:59] you know almost 500 episodes of you guys talking absolute nonsense yeah you probably know what you're talking about and they just got it completely complicated for no reason whatsoever uh it's it's about like a secret government organization that's to do with an ai that was created by the xerox company back in the 80s and it's like it's like it's like veger from star trek the motion picture

[01:11:26] like it it calls to the ais and they want to they want to uh what does veger say oh uh touch the creator it wants to touch the creator uh like a lot of that and i just think like there was a much simpler way of just doing like they steal megan they reprogram her to be an assassin and it's about getting her back or something like that like that that that's got the spy stuff without all of these mcguffins and there's a lot of fetch quests in this film

[01:11:53] and it just convolutes itself so you don't really know who's who and you don't really know why anyone's doing anything and then we get to this lab sequence at the end of the film well there's a couple of nice little fight scenes between the bots and uh and all that sort of thing but i had i think i was watching it i was like i've forgotten why they're here i'm not entirely sure what the purpose is right now yeah well like the the christian villain who it's like a reveal that he's the bad guy behind all of this

[01:12:21] he's like this anti-ai activist i gotta be honest with you when i got to the end of the movie i'm like i don't really understand what this character wants or what he's been doing for the whole film yeah what was like was he was he sleeping with the main character well not the main character but uh allison williams is gemma the sort of surrogate mother yeah character um it's like a to sort of keep the enemy sweet maybe i don't know i i would say so i don't think the film knows

[01:12:50] it's like yeah but the problem is too it's like someone can easily go back and like well he mentions it in his line of you know exposition but there's so much exposition in this movie there's a certain point you're like am i watching a robot fighting movie or am i watching a movie where people tell you the plot of the movie yeah it is there's like okay let's take a spy movie let's talk spy movies talk about a spy movie with a lot of exposition let's talk about spy game a lot of exposition in that

[01:13:19] michael frost beckner love you buddy we've had you on the show there's a lot of people standing around talking in that film yeah it's about how you deliver it yeah you make it interesting you make it understandable so you can bring the audience in but maybe not completely understandable so there's an air of mystery to it you're intrigued you want to know more you have intriguing characters that are charismatic that pull you in well it's like the intriguing world of espionage this secret world that yeah you feel like you're like okay i think i understand it and oh wait

[01:13:49] and then there's another twist and you're like oh this is why they're the experts this is this is the shadowy world that i'll never fully understand like you're watching a lecari adaptation that's any good or you're reading a lecari book there is twist upon twist upon twist and you don't see them coming and that's interesting this does not know how to write a spy plot it feels like it unfortunately i did write this down in my notes it chat gpt the spy plot yeah and you've got like that tim sharp character

[01:14:17] who plays the agent saddler the FBI boss well he's like he worked for like the defense innovation unit that's what it was sure and i'm like i don't understand what that is like yeah just have him work for something i know what it is i'm cia i handled it like technology for the cia oh okay that i understand but like i'm like wait who who who really oversees the defense innovation unit like is it it seemed to be military but i'm not really sure well like the the secretary of

[01:14:47] of defense came in the room and remonstrated them at the beginning of the film yeah but then he's like teamed up with the FBI i'm like oh like make it simple just make it simple yeah like especially when you're actually like take it from a different angle if you're foolish enough to turn your sequel into a different genre at least make the new genre fun and understandable and i think there's a problem because any 14 year old kid could tell their friends

[01:15:16] what megan's about the first film yeah go on you've got my note written down they could not describe the story other than evil megan versus good megan yeah which is not what this is no and a lot of this is bog like if you'd made a 90 minute like there's an evil megan on the loose and it's hunting down the creator there's your movie yeah yeah stronger ai or something like that yeah or you make that will smith film

[01:15:46] where he fights a young version of himself yeah and like the the villain uh christian played by aristotle athari great name i don't want to like you know pile on the guy but like he does not have the charisma to be the main villain at the local drama school just finished up its year and had some people for hire or something or like was that a favor yeah another actually tied to this another dislike i had was this movie feels like it has to really double down on a lot of things in the first film in addition to bringing

[01:16:15] all this kind of spy stuff that's unnecessary but the characters of cole and tess who were like allison williams co-workers in the first film yeah give them like you know cameos or something like this in this movie but like or just drop them but or drop them but like they are given far more to do and they're never particularly fun and like they keep getting written off screen because they want to take you back to megan yeah and so if you don't want

[01:16:45] them there in your scenes don't put them in your film they just pad it out there's a whole scene with a coal in the vents that i was like i i i don't know i don't know what yeah because they never really like clearly it wasn't important that he was in that vent because mithrigan could still achieve her objective she fails but like she could have still achieved her objective without him yeah and he accidentally chloroforms himself yeah didn't we all laugh um and then wakes up later and goes oh wow

[01:17:15] okay and then doesn't even like really help when he wakes up yeah kind of is there for a bit and yeah i just feel like um what's that what's that saying kill you kill your um darlings yeah and that's the thing it's like those two characters um almost died or at least one of them did almost died in the first film right so there was like also like you didn't know who they were in the first movie you're like the end they could die i don't know sure they could there's no sense

[01:17:44] they have like plot armor in this movie where you're like they're not going to kill these characters they are now like beloved fixtures of this franchise and so i'm watching a lot of scenes with them going like they're not that fun but i also know they're just going to keep hanging around because they're not going to kill them nope no and no that's the other thing actually tied to that is that there's no sense of menace or danger to anything in this entire film no and that's that's what worked with the first one a lot was you wasn't quite sure

[01:18:14] what Mithrigan could do exactly and in this case Amelia is highly capable very deadly so you could amp up the danger if you wanted but they didn't i mean seeing her kill like unnamed operatives or whatever like buyers or Jermaine Clement Jermaine Clement like who cares like these are just kind of like characters who get either no screen time really or like five minutes four minutes

[01:18:43] like if if you saw like an escalating series of like holy crap like Amelia killed i killed the two assistants like kill have her kill those yeah like you'd be like oh wow and honestly that's the difference between a terminator 2 and this movie which is like the t1000 is killing everything in its path including john connor's you know step parents all these people you see along the way it's killing and so there is that sense of rising danger that this thing

[01:19:13] is a killing machine and then by the end where they're like oh and Amelia was just a puppet the whole time and Christiane was controlling it i'm like what like what yeah she wasn't even sentient particularly she was just like a a puppet she was um well she was the bad guy from superman oh um haha well there was a nuclear man and then there was um the one no no yeah yeah the new superman the new superman yeah yeah uh yeah uh yeah anyway

[01:19:42] well that's my dislikes but i do have a couple of final notes if you want to go to that so do i yeah yeah go for it one thing i noted uh is they say um make me taller when they remake mithrigan which is to do with i guess the actress's age has advanced which had a bit of growth spurt yeah but do you think a little bit of reason why they're shooting around the fact that she's in this film because she's not in a lot of this film yeah is because she isn't the age she was before and perhaps she has different opportunities and things now she's not as available as she was before

[01:20:11] that's exactly why it was because the actress was growing and so she was going to be taller than the first film right yeah yeah uh okay well that's uh that's interesting one question i wanted to ask about genre swings and we mentioned some that works some that didn't what's the best most successful complete polar opposite swing in the other direction that's happened in film history i mean i do love love love army of darkness um i think that's it

[01:20:41] i think a lot of people love army of darkness but i wouldn't say it's successful i would say it's successful okay at sending up those kind of like cheesy um not ray harryhausen those movies are made well but like the ones that are kind of knockoffs of those types of movies i think it does a really good job poking fun at those um i'm trying to think though of like franchises where they took wild swings in a different direction i am going to sit here and rack my brain well i've got a couple

[01:21:11] reddit have given me a few to list off where we can talk about whether they're successful or not if you'd like sure go for it cars 2 oh that was a that was a dud yeah no one liked that made money though it did make money uh did make money uh we will tackle it on the show because it is a spy movie um i don't know the rambo's well enough but the rambo 1 and 2 are very different apparently that's very true actually yes the first one is a very gritty like character drama and then the second one is a absolutely pumped up crazy action movie

[01:21:40] uh that basically goes against the entire message of the first film uh so i that is actually a good comparison and i love both movies so um another one i'm not giving all the answers but uh i mentioned this earlier which is cloverfield to 10 cloverfield lane yeah yeah you're no you're right it's like a kaiju film into a like more psychological thriller yeah yeah another one is unbreakable into split that one is i feel like

[01:22:10] the thing was like they connect well i think like they're both like these psychological thrillers mm-hmm yeah different a little different but yeah and the other one that jumped out to me is for the dark world into love and thunder yeah well that's more of a tone thing i feel like than an actual genre shift i mean it's more like a buddy film the second one the third one the second one is a full-on superhero film yeah that's true um

[01:22:40] that one a little less so i mean obviously uh ragnarok is better well okay so i've i've given everyone a list there i've given everyone a bunch of opportunity a bunch of answers what's the best one for you i don't have an answer i just want to hear what you think i mean i think army of darkness is my favorite i would say gremlins 2 though is very effective i prefer gremlins 2 i i've rewatched that way more times than army darkness i think i prefer oh uh between the i was gonna say i prefer gremlins 1 to gremlins 2 i think a little but uh yeah

[01:23:09] but i do like gremlins 2 a lot army of darkness i've watched god it's one of those like movies i've seen the most in my life uh i've got two more notes do you want to jump in with yours or should i just do my two uh sorry i was gonna say like this movie is almost like if you were like man people love jack sparrow in pirates of the caribbean i really like him what if we did like a uh 1940s noir film with jack sparrow

[01:23:39] you know what i mean like that's what this feels like at times sure oh as in like just a like a comparison point yeah the whiplash where you're like wait no no they liked him doing pirate things yeah what why is he wearing a fedora yeah no no no no no you don't get it he owns a club but he's still jack sparrow he can't trust anyone but he is not the law it's uh it's a tough world out there yeah see there's there's comparison points to pirate

[01:24:09] films no there's not no there's not yeah yeah uh a note i had was um the steven seagal running joke is interesting about this um i mean i on one hand as someone who obviously watched a lot of seagal movies in his younger years was very amused hearing things like i mean above the law and listen to his music apparently i do have his mojo priest album yeah uh image on screen now folks yeah yeah um but um

[01:24:38] it was fun hearing mentions of executive decision and above the law and i can't remember the other one she mentioned um it was it wasn't under siege and it wasn't out for justice um i can't remember i just i just wrote down above the law because it's uh it's our friend andy davis right yeah yeah there was like that made me chuckle but at the same time i'm like are why are we is she watching those films like it's one of those like uh poorly disguised

[01:25:07] fetish of a writer in the film type things where clearly the writers love seagal films i don't believe that any of the characters in this film love seagal films i mean it was an in joke because the girl was learning aikido which is steven seagal's martial art specialty allegedly uh that's his specialty um so i get it but like at the same time would this like katie character be watching or like obsessing over steven seagal also in 2026 oh he really made 2025 i guess

[01:25:37] would he really be making a movie that's like remember seagal constantly well like constantly like evoking him in way i mean allison williams does at one point say something like problematic steven seagal or something i don't remember what the joke was but she does make a reference about that but i'm like yeah but you keep doing it yeah but they're not making like i i guess like they could have doubled down and made like mel gibson jokes or uh different though do you remember the patriot do you remember what a girl wants uh but it's like steven seagal's uh

[01:26:07] the reason this man fled to russia is what women want i think actually i'll take that back yeah what women want yeah it's like there's a lot of like human trafficking allegations and very serious things with steven seagal so it's kind of weird maybe maybe he uh maybe he taught ivana sax no when she was in russian ballet maybe that's what he's been up to there is something i saw of him like he is a mojo priest apparently i did see like russian video of him like dancing or something like that it was pretty insane yeah i've got two

[01:26:36] more notes you got anything else uh i thought the teletubby body was pretty funny yeah okay yeah that was like kind of funny um i i liked the action scene with in the house with megan controlling the various apparatus to like that was fun be more effective yeah like the idea of like that was interesting uh megan who's like untethered from her physical body who's actually just existing in like the cloud or whatever as an agent of chaos yeah doing things

[01:27:06] like i liked when they you know when katie tasered the guy and then uh megan turned on the sprinklers to make it that much worse yeah and that is an interesting commentary on like people having these ai devices in their home like i don't have them personally i don't like them i don't like being listened to and i know i have an lg television so allegedly that's listening to me too allegedly don't see me lg but it chose not to go that way yeah um i had two more things i had okay i i did like the

[01:27:35] 80s robot we got to see on screen which was like rob the robot from the nintendo yeah the one that would play gyromite and stack i think stack up or whatever it was called stack up or something yeah it was nice to do that again that's a very like 80s reference that clearly was coming from like the director um but also the like i gotta be honest i rolled my eyes at the katie is now a tech genius who can like solve all the problems i'm like i wrote that down writing code and all i'm just like

[01:28:03] come on come on couldn't she just be a scared girl or make it human or well or make a teenager who succeeds on their own terms not like applying the skills of a like well-schooled heavily experienced adult into a teenager no um okay two little notes uh later in the film the amelia character is walking around in a

[01:28:31] metropolis inspired outfit yep uh which i quite liked to see that's fun that was cool one of the births of like i kind of like robots on screen and also she sits in like a throne at one point which is similar to the throne and the lights from the film in metropolis is actually a really nice shot i did that that that's like filmmaking craft i like that and it's like knowledge of films it's probably the reason why the most recent minions film didn't work um and lastly this is was going to be my red alert for the episode

[01:29:01] but you you took us into that way early uh at one moment i think during the sort of um like party thing they go to or whatever where megan mithrigan does the dancing yeah they have a little detector to try and track down amelia the boop boop boop boop boop boop sound it makes is from the tricorder in the wrath of khan oh very cool very cool i had the prop of it well the toy prop of it as a kid so that

[01:29:30] noise is very much in my head so uh yeah for those watching uh the video version i might just have a quick sound clip for you here to hear and compare but if i can't source the material let's just pretend i was right they wanted gen z badly they wanted that gen z audience that wrath of khan reference they love that steven seagal movie references wrath of khan oh metropolis metropolis they putty in their hands oh my god

[01:29:59] uh that's me for notes and that leaves us with the final question the knock list the need to see official is it a film you need to see if you like spy movies or you want to know more about spy movies or is it a film that should never be seen that's an interesting question uh mithrigan 2.0

[01:30:31] cam no no i thought this was like a disappointment because i actually enjoyed the first one and so when i held off watching the sequel i was hoping i'd at least like tune in and get something like you know death day 2 which i did enjoy yeah um where it's a different energy that i can understand why audiences didn't respond but i have fun with and i just wish i'd had fun with this movie there was bits and pieces i enjoyed but like i i just found it frustrating a lot of the time and so yeah it's it's a pass

[01:31:01] uh one note from you as for myself it's also a no this film isn't terrible no with two threes instead of ease uh but it isn't fun and i think that's often what i come to for these or at least something to pull me in i wasn't pulled in by the characters i wasn't having fun and they made it two hours yes just a recipe for disaster there you go folks two no's and as such mithrigan 2.0 is not making the knock list but cam is

[01:31:30] the dossier on the film complete and filed as classified yeah this is not a i don't think this is a uh disavowed movie i think it's it looks too good it has ambitious ideas that just aren't connecting but it's trying okay well i think we had to have that conversation before we signed off so there you go yeah no disavows dossier on the film is complete and filed as classified and that folks is your halloween special wasn't quite as spooky as possession no but it did disturb us yeah and it's like the thing is there are other

[01:31:59] movies on our list to tackle for future halloweens and like there's a number of body horror movies and i was like after possession i'm like let's just take a little bit longer a gap you know maybe next year we'll do like uh be a cronenberg film or something like that maybe or i was thinking like possessor uh something like that you know sure yeah yeah well it's 365 days away folks anything can happen uh but there you go thanks for tuning

[01:32:27] in this week cam now the question goes to you what are we tackling next week um i guess you know i wouldn't have known this so much at the time in terms of programming but we're going to be basically doing another comedy next week um a more straightforward comedy but i would have gone into this thinking this is more our halloween episode it's maybe a tech thriller you know in a spy mold but it's really a campy comedy uh but next week we're going to be looking at the 1997 bill

[01:32:57] murray film the man who knew too little it's one you've been requesting for years uh perhaps not as much as the austin powers films or some other bond films but we don't like talking about bond every week here we like having some fun that's right so we are going to go back to 1997 to hang out with the highly funny and to some people uh sometimes problematic too bill murray uh but frankly he won my heart over with ghostbusters and it's hard not to walk away from that as we take a look at the man who knew too

[01:33:26] little and the following week we'll even have a special interview with the director of the film john amiel who takes us way behind the scenes on the film for one of my favorite interviews that we've recorded this year we've been sat on it for a little while because we did this one back in the summer um and i can't wait for you all to hear the interview it's it's genuinely fascinating hearing stories about working with bill murray and some of the other films he worked on um i really recommend tuning in for that but i also really recommend tuning in next

[01:33:56] week as we take a look at the man who knew too little thank you all for joining us here wherever you're listening or watching if you're over on the youtube make sure you leave us a like make sure you subscribe ring the bell i don't know whatever you want to do leave a comment tell us what you thought of mithrigan 2.0 did the mithrigan joke work did we say it enough times where we shied show bobbed our face self in the face enough times that it became funny again or have we really just more of a sideshow mel here

[01:34:25] yeah sad trombone um and if you're listening on the audio version thank you for tuning in wherever you're listening make sure you hit subscribe and leave us a review five star would be preferable if you could and if you could also leave some notes about it that would be great too because we love to hear your thoughts on the film and wherever you're listening or if you're catching us over on social media at spy hards s-p-y-h-a-r-d-s let us know what you thought of mithrigan 2.0 we'd love to hear your thoughts you can

[01:34:55] also write to us mail at spyhards.com and you can get straight to us and tell us your thoughts and we'd love to read them out on the show but until next time folks you'll find me ending this episode like i end every spyhards episode disturbed and yet highly aroused this podcast is part of podomity the uk's podcast

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