Meg 2: The Trench review
You’re gonna need a campy tone.
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Meg 2: The Trench
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Screenplay by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris
Starring Jason Statham, Wu Jing, Sophia Cai, Page Kennedy and Sienna Guillory
Meg 2: The Trench Review
2018’s The Meg was a mind-numbing experience. To this day I cannot for the life of me understand how someone made such a boring giant shark movie. There have been plenty of bad shark movies, mind you. Perhaps more than any other sub-genre of film, in fact. Rarely have any of those stinkers that revel in absurdity been as boring, however. Flash forward five years and we have the release of Meg 2: The Trench. With a trailer promising a sillier tone and ample moments of fist pumping stupidity…surely this Jason Statham led giant shark sequel would deliver the kind of summer fun worth wading back into the water for. Well…they got me again.
Most of Meg 2: The Trench is, again, boring. These movies keep finding their way into the hands of filmmakers who think that giant prehistoric sharks are the least interesting aspect of their stories. If you’ve seen the incredibly fun (and misleading) trailer for Meg 2…almost all of it takes place in the third act of the movie. At least it’s in there at all. You’d be forgiven for fearing that you will never see something fun well over an hour in.
What makes Meg 2 so frustrating is that the studio behind it clearly knows what people want to see. They cut that trailer, after all. Moreover, they purposely play keep away with the fun until later in the story. That’s a neat trick for low-budget films. When you can only do so much…save it for when it will be most impactful. Meg 2: The Trench had a giant budget. Instead of spending it on fun things like watching Jason Statham punch sharks in the face…we get long walks on the ocean floor and shootouts with other humans.
Like the original film, Meg 2 is too light on laughs to have been an accident. A good laugh can go a long way to staving off boredom. While there is the odd chuckle to be had here and there…mostly we are subjected to overly serious situations that could have been easily presented in more entertaining ways. Even the moments meant to be funny largely fall flat. This is a byproduct of the tedious nature of Meg 2’s first hour. People will laugh when they’re absorbed in a tense story. Meg 2 never feels tense. Until the final act…it rarely feels exciting.
We reconnect with some characters from the first film. Meg 2 seems to believe that these characters have earned something from their previous adventure…that we’ll be thrilled to revisit old friends. Outside of Statham’s Jonas and the young Meiying…I couldn’t even remember which characters we’d met before. A major plot point in the story is that there is a traitor in their midst. When it was revealed, I genuinely wasn’t sure if the character had been in the first movie or not. It’s hard to feel betrayed by someone you have no recollection of in the first place.
The plot of Meg 2…and yes, there is a plot…that’s one of its biggest issues…involves eco-terrorists trying to get rich by collecting minerals from the bottom of the ocean. They accidentally create a way for multiple megalodons to reach the surface. The movie then forgets about the megalodons for a long time. It also forgets to be fun. It remembers to be stupid quite often…but not in the way you want it to be. The moments of absurdity are constantly undercut by the serious tone of the film. If Meg 2 had presented a lighter tone…its silliness would hit different. It would be part of the fun. Instead, it becomes eye-rolling juxtaposed with the boring build.
What is it building to, you might ask? Fun Island. That’s right…in one final slap in the face of viewers hoping for a wild ride…they name the location of all the fun you saw in the trailers…FUN ISLAND. They should have named the rest of the movie Boring Ocean. Here we finally get Jason Statham vs. Megalodons. They even threw in a giant octopus. Most of the good stuff was in the trailer. By the time we get to the tropical vacation spot…it’s too late for the thrills to thrill. Too late for the silliness to entertain.
Meg 2: The Trench is a movie that is too dumb to know that it needs to be stupid. In fairness, so was its predecessor. In that way…it’s a fitting sequel to The Meg. It takes what didn’t work last time and gives us three times as much of it. Somewhere there is a wildly entertaining movie where Jason Statham battles sharks. Strike two on finding it.
Scare Value
Fool me twice…shame on me. Despite a trailer cut together with the promise of a movie filled with over-the-top, ridiculous hijinks…Meg 2: The Trench follows in its predecessor’s footsteps by sticking to serious tone. A seriously boring tone. By the time they let us get to Fun Island everything that should be exciting instead sticks out as silly. Just let Jason Statham fight giant sharks in increasingly creative and absurd ways and stop trying to tell dramatic oceanography stories already.
2/5
Meg 2: The Trench Link
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