Two years ago, killer doll movie M3GAN captured the public mood around AI by invading social media and being generally annoying. Now the tech bro pin-up is back in this overlong sequel they should have called M3GAN 2.0 Hours.

M3GAN 2.0 sees the series pivot from horror to action, and recalibrates its eponymous villain into a hero; so far so Terminator, except the process appears to have completely changed her personality, as though Arnold Schwarzenegger had spent Terminator 2 doling out lectures on parenthood.

She does at least stick to her prime directive of protecting her tween owner Cady (Violet McGraw), which is more than can be said for M3GAN’s inventor and Cady’s aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), who has gone down the path of Claire in Jurassic World 2 and now goes around giving TED Talks on the dangers of AI – presumably entitled, “My Bad! Why I Was Wrong to Build a Robot Capable of Murder.”

And yet she is vindicated when a Terminator 3-style lady robot goes rogue, a situation that Gemma is called on to resolve for reasons that are never explained during two hours of explanation, flashbacks to scenes that literally just happened, and people saying things like, “Innovation, no matter how cool it may seem, is a ticking time bomb.” The outcome is a weirdly earnest film about AI regulation, begging the question of who this is meant to be for and how we make it stop.

Where the first movie was solely built around its meme potential, the sequel doesn’t even have that going for it – not for lack of trying; one particularly embarrassing scene has M3GAN singing a Kate Bush song, which the producers assumed to be a viral cheat code and were proven quite wrong at the box office. And for all the advancements in AI and visual effects over the past two years, the titular bot still looks like the poster child for Silicon Uncanny Valley.

Gerard Johnstone implants a surfeit of gags about smart devices backfiring, all of which The Mitchells vs. the Machines did back when the only famous M3GAN was the one married to H4RRY, and none of which explain why anti-AI activist Gemma has loaded her house with more tech tools than Jeffrey Epstein’s address book.

But for all its attempts at tech satire, the film’s most ironic failing is its lack of self-awareness. Like M3GAN herself it is forbidden by programming to be violent or sweary, rendering it less RoboCop and more Baby Wee Wee. And it violates all its own rules, changing its unlikeable characters’ motivations as if by flicking a switch mid-scene, and using its artificial platform to insult our intelligence.