M3GAN is a welcome addition to the demon doll genre; Velma fails to spook

FOX / UNIVERSAL PICTURES / NETFLIX

M3GAN

(In theaters now)

Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures

There she was all winter, the demented demon doll body-ody-odying through our dreams and our social feeds, a fitting meme for these times. That M3GAN is also actually a movie feels almost like an afterthought; what further proof of concept can 100 minutes at a multiplex bring that the fruit-fly loops of TikTok failed to supply? Nothing, really, though Gerard Johnstone's horror comedy — hard emphasis on the second word — sustains the joke surprisingly well for most of its runtime: a scampering Blumhouse caper that turns out to be blithely self-aware, negligibly jump-scary, and mostly very fun.

Allison Williams is Gemma, who works for a sleek toy company somewhere near Seattle, churning out Furby-like moppets called Purr-fect Pets for the masses — though her passion project is a lifelike AI she's christened M3GAN (or if you don't go in for kicky acronyms, Model 3 Generative Android). When her sister and brother-in-law are killed in a car accident, she also abruptly becomes guardian to her nine-year-old niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). But who has time to parent a grieving child when production deadlines loom?

M3GAN turns out to be a great proxy for that, an emotional support animal forged from wigs, silicone, and ones and zeroes: She reads bedtime stories in every character's voice, provides motherly bathroom discipline, and seems to have an endless supply of Wikipedia fun facts. She is also, it turns out, unfailingly loyal, less like a lap dog than a four-foot mafioso. And when various outsiders interfere  — a meddling neighbor, a nasty classmate, any misguided human who attempts to hit her power switch — her reflex response is homicide. It's entertaining, and not particularly bloody, to watch her cut a swath (sometimes literally) through various set pieces and soft tissues, preening and dropping pithy one-liners with as much hair-flipping malevolence as any star of Selling Sunset.

It's also not hard to know who's marked for death as soon as they walk on screen (rest in pieces, bully boy). But the tart in-jokes and absurdities of the script, its winky acknowledgments of all the tropes gone before it, feel like a delirious cap on recent genre hits like Barbarian and Malignant. This is not the morose, carnage-soaked horror of dank basements and clammy night terrors; most of the movie happens in bright daylight, every maniacal head tilt, ungodly hip swivel, and murder-by-gardening-tool calibrated for screams that end not with a gasp but a giggle. M3GAN came to play, and possibly reboot her motherboard for a sequel. Are you not entertained? Grade: B+ — Leah Greenblatt

Alert

(Premiering Sunday, Jan. 8 after football on Fox)

Philippe Bosse/FOX Dania Ramirez and Scott Caan in 'Alert'

Scott Caan was built for procedural TV. Square-jawed and handsome, the former Hawaii Five-0 star fuses a steely "saving the world" countenance with a flip, wiseacre charm that automatically makes him the most interesting character in every scene. Those qualities are put to capable use in Alert: Missing Persons Unit, an above-average case-of-the-week thriller that should fit in nicely with Fox's lineup of crisis-responder dramas.

Six years after their son went missing, private security contractor Jason Grant (Caan) and police officer Nikki Batista (Once Upon a Time's Dania Ramirez) are amicably separated and trying to move on with their lives. At least, Nikki is: She's now head of Philly PD's Missing Persons Unit and in a committed relationship with fellow MPU agent Mike (Ryan Broussard). Jason, meanwhile, is faking orgasms because he can't bear to tell his girlfriend (Bre Blair) that he's not ready to have another child. (This is a running joke in the first two episodes. You're not on CBS anymore, Scotty!) But when Jason learns that his boy may still be alive, he joins forces with Nikki and the MPU to find him and bring his kidnapper to justice.

The MPU characters are all variations on templates from the procedural playbook: Mike is the stable nice guy; C (Petey Gibson) is the bespectacled, persnickety forensic anthropologist; and Kemi (Adeola Role) is the brilliant and eccentric analyst who lights a lot of incense and talks frequently about her past lives. Showrunner John Eisendrath (The Blacklist) keeps the time-is-running-out tension humming while managing efficient detours into the characters' personal lives and weaving in an ongoing mystery about Jason and Nikki's long-lost son. As Nikki, Ramirez offers a stalwart, no-nonsense balance to Jason's off-kilter energy, and she handles a showy stunt sequence in the premiere nicely. And Caan, reliably, is the everything bagel seasoning that keeps Alert from being just another bland lump of procedural dough. Grade: B —Kristen Baldwin

The Pale Blue Eye

(On Netflix now)

Scott Garfield/Netflix Christian Bale stars in 'The Pale Blue Eye' as Det. Augustus Landor opposite Harry Melling's 'The Pale Blue Eye.'

Has Christian Bale ever met a dark horse he couldn't sell? Filmmaker Scott Cooper and his actor muse have now made three movies together over the last decade, all variations on a theme (or two themes, really: blood vengeance and tortured masculinity). The Pale Blue Eye, which follows their contemporary Rust Belt noir Out of the Furnace and 2017's brutal frontier epic Hostiles, has all the signposts of another Cooper-Bale special: bruised knuckles and battered psyches, death without mercy and even less levity.

The parched and wintry Pale duly delivers all that, with frostbite: The cinematography is grimly gorgeous and the austere, brooding atmosphere threaded with old-timey dread. But it also has a bright skein of offbeat whimsy running through it, thanks in part to a delightfully unbound performance by Harry Melling (The Old Guard), who nearly turns the movie into a weird and tender buddy comedy with Bale, before it all surrenders to deep-purple melodrama in the last act.

To be fair, purple is pretty much the baseline for a film in which young men keep turning up ritualistically dead — particularly when one of their peers, played by Melling, is the Godfather of Goth himself, Edgar Allan Poe. His Poe doesn't yet look capable of growing a mustache when we first meet him as a young cadet at circa-1830s West Point, a cheerful outcast with a flutey Southern drawl and seemingly no natural aptitude for military life. Edgar isn't a direct witness when a classmate is discovered hanging from a tree one cold morning with his heart surgically removed from his chest, but he has a lot of fanciful theories he's eager to share with Bale's Augustus Landor, the flinty veteran detective summoned from New York City to investigate. (Gillian Anderson, vibrating on high, and Bohemian Rhapsody's Lucy Boynton also costar in elaborate hoop skirts.)

Cooper, working from the bestselling 2003 novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, builds a solid murder mystery out of Victorian scheming and icebox ambience (rarely has an entire cast looked so genuinely in need of heating pads.) Until he loses his way in the cascading absurdity of the final twists, though, the movie is mostly a study in how good its two main actors can be: Bale's soulful, hollow-eyed conviction, and his odd-couple chemistry with Melling, isn't quite enough to sell The Pale Blue Eye's loopy improbabilities in the end, but it's still a pleasure to watch them try. Grade: B — Leah Greenblatt

Velma

(Streaming on HBO Max Jan. 12)

HBO MAX 'Velma'

Velma dares to ask a dumb question: What if the Scooby Gang were meta jerks who wanna bone? "This is my origin story," says Velma (voiced by producer Mindy Kaling) at the start of the HBO Max reboot premiering Jan. 12. The series flashes back to the high school prehistory of "the greatest team of spooky mystery solvers ever," when they variously hated or barely acknowledged each other. It's a prequel that re-casts diversely, re-orients sexually, and over-backstories generally. Should be fun, but it's a self-aware slog. Everyone talks like a TV writer who only knows TV writers. The nonstop references are nonstop ancient: Jill Stein, She's All That, the suspicious assertion that Band Geeks Being Weird equals comedy gold. "This is exactly what happened in my vlog about Lil Wayne!" someone says on TV in 2023. Velma is the new bland, a deconstructed canonical bonanza pulled right off the corporate assembly line. It's so extra it's minus. GRADE: C —Darren Franich

Read EW's full Velma review here

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