Director: Ben Wheatley
Writers: Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, and Dean Georgaris
Stars: Jason Statham, Jing Wu, Shuya Sophia Cai
Synopsis: A research team encounters multiple threats while exploring the depths of the ocean, including a malevolent mining operation.
Meg 2: The Trench has Ben Wheatley making sure the film lives up to its ridiculous premise, at least for its third act. It is a baffling and self-aware shark movie that, for most of its runtime, doesn’t rely on the titular creatures to its fullest capacity. While the image of Jason Statham on a jet-ski throwing harpoons with bombs attached to a megalodon might be an appetizer to your B-movie craving, you are never fed a full meal.
Filmmakers have always profited from our fear of the deep blue sea since the beginning of cinema. From The Creature of the Black Lagoon to The Poseidon Adventure, there are various ways for directors to make us buy a ticket for some fear-eliciting cinematic deep-sea experiences. But the ones that have remained a constant staple in pop culture throughout the decades are shark movies (and the sharksploitation movement that came along). This is why Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was the first movie to make us think twice before going head-first into the water. Sharks are some of the most impressive yet gruesome creatures lurking around the sea. Spielberg managed to capture their essence and our fears, even without even showing the beast for the majority of the film, relying on the image of its fin and John Williams’ classic score.
After such a horror classic, other directors wanted to cash in with their own versions. Some did so by focusing on other marine predators, like Joe Dante with Piranha (and later on the horrid sequel by James Cameron). In contrast, others literally and figuratively jumped the shark and made things more ridiculous just for the sake of it. These films were made to be easy cash grabs that entertained via their over-the-top and cheesy demeanor, as well as filling the craving for the audience’s shark obsessions. But, over the years, these films have gotten even more baffling, hence the likes of the Sharknado franchise, Planet of the Sharks, and the recently released Cocaine Shark. That’s where the Jon Turtletaub film starring action-star Jason Statham, The Meg, comes into play – being one of the best in the bunch of silly and exaggerated shark pictures.
Five years have passed since Statham came face to face with a Megalodon (and won). Has enough time gone by for a rematch? Answers vary, depending on who you ask. I definitely think it is time for man and beast to fight one another once again; this time, anything goes. Whether you were anticipating it or not, a sequel to the underwater cheese and ham parade, Meg 2: The Trench, has arrived with the talented English filmmaker Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Highrise) at the helm. This one is more ridiculous and self-aware than the first installment… at least in its last twenty minutes or so. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same issues that made the 2018 blockbuster miss its B-movie mark: taking too long to get the shark action-slasher elements going, being unnecessarily two hours long, and focusing on the humans more so than the creatures themselves – the latter of these issues is what plagued the abominably creaky Godzilla vs. Kong back in 2021.
Meg 2: The Trench begins with a false statement: a small dinosaur is eaten by an even larger one, who seconds later is eaten by a Megalodon. You would think that with this introduction, the film would make more time for what all of us sitting at the theater want to see: seventy-five-foot sharks eating people for lunch and later seeing Jason Statham fight against them in a brutally illogical battle in the seas. Though, just like the first installment, its first scene promises something it can’t keep. Then it flash-forwards to the present day, where we get one plot exposition dump after the other, with some thrilling sequences intercut between them. Still, none deliver what we all want to begin with – we’d have to wait almost ninety minutes or so for that.
This movie is set ten years after the first film. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) and company are still doing the regular secretive underwater exploration near the Mariana trench in the Mana One operation’s base. Not only are they keeping tabs on the megs lurking near those waters, but they are also researching the areas twenty-five-thousand feet deep. What they find down there is more shocking than a gigantic killer octopus; they spot an unseen base at the bottom of the trench, where some people are mining a rock that contains many minerals and combustibles. And when other fishy scenarios cross their paths, Taylor suspects they have been sabotaged by one of their own just to break the bank with these newly found sea stones.
All of this isn’t explained in full detail. In fact, the writers know that trying to make sense of everything that happens in the film isn’t going to work in their favor. So, they chose to give the implication of a story and go along the journey where we mostly see Statham growling his lines and punching faces left and right. And while I like to see that in the Transporter and Crank films, here it is the most bland and lazy version of such, to the point where it begins to bore the audience. It keeps you alert because the situations get more silly (and convoluted) by the second. Though, you end up laughing more at the movie than with it for its two acts. You start shouting internally: “When is the shark mayhem going to happen?” and “What’s taking so long for a shark to hunt its lunch?”
What the poster promises arrives during the third act, and it is entertaining, yet it feels too late at this point in the story. After more than ninety minutes of wandering through the seas, Meg 2: The Trench finally begins showing the carnage and rampage, although with the high number of deaths during this closing act, rarely enough, there isn’t much blood being splattered. One of the best moments doesn’t last long, yet it managed to leave an impression on me; it is a POV shot from the megalodon’s mouth as it munches people down. That quick scene was utterly fantastic, leaving me with some bittersweet feelings because it represented what the film could have been and the beauty of B-movie practicality and ingenuity. There are other moments that you could say are pretty cool. However, we got too little for the price of admission because it wanted to use all of its characters (both disposable and so-called “heroes”) to fight some creatures, which leaves less time with Statham fighting megs and a giant octopus.
Even when you consider Ben Wheatley’s talent, it doesn’t matter because you can barely notice that it was one of his films. He doesn’t have any wiggle room due to the screenplay, which takes its time to “develop the plot” so it can later embrace the craziness of its premise. If you are going to make a B-movie, or something similar, you need the Roger Corman effect – trim everything down to its bare essentials, cut it down to ninety minutes (or less), and grasp the brutality and chaos of its killers. Meg 2: The Trench is held back by its story when it should have ditched that to go all out with its true purpose of creature feature delights. It made me wonder if the people on board this multi-million-dollar ship knew what they were making in the first place. That’s why, despite receiving some gnarly, purposefully schlocky sequences, Meg 2: The Trench feels like yet another missed opportunity both by the studio and the filmmaker attached.
