Meg 2: The Trench – Film Review
After going head to head with a megalodon, a gigantic prehistoric shark, in 2018’s The Meg, Jason Statham is back for seconds with Meg 2: The Trench.
He returns as eco-warrior and deep sea rescuer Jonas Taylor, who leads a mission to explore an uncharted sector of a trench with the research team at the Mana One facility. The crew encounters multiple threats while exploring the depths of the ocean, including a bunch of megalodons and a malevolent mining operation on the sea floor.
I actually struggled to recall the plot of this film because it is so rote, dull and convoluted – until the final act (more on that later). Director Ben Wheatley and his team seemed to forget that the audience is there to see Statham fight some giant sharks and instead gave us a story about our good guys going up against the bad mining team. There was not enough megalodon action for a big chunk of this movie and way too much human-on-human peril.
Like the first film, it’s impossible to ignore the parallels to Jaws (the defining shark movie!) While those references were expected, I was surprised by how often Jurassic Park came to mind, for reasons I won’t spoil. I also thought of Piranha 3D during the wild final act and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom during one action moment.
The film improves once the deep sea portion ends. It stops taking itself so seriously and leans into the silliness. It finally starts to have fun! The final showdown, set on Fun Island, is a go-for-broke sequence that is so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but laugh. If the entirety of the film had that cheesy B-movie vibe, I would have come away entertained. It’s a shame it took so long to click into that gear.
The Meg films should be comedies or horror comedies instead of action movies because that tone seems better suited to the ludicrous concept. It is nowhere near as funny as it could have been, the writing is rather poor, the CGI is iffy, and the action scenes (before the Fun Island sequence) are boring and so poorly edited that I struggled to follow them. Also, there is very little explanation about the baddies’ motives so it was hard to truly care about them.
Statham delivers the exact performance you would expect and it works well enough for this silly action movie. Cliff Curtis, Shuya Sophia Cai and Page Kennedy also return from the original and were the strongest members of the cast (although Kennedy’s DJ gets some terrible lines). I particularly enjoyed Chinese actor and martial artist Jing Wu, a new addition, as he gets to do almost as much crazy s**t as Statham. You’ve got to suspend your belief!
Wheatley failed Meg 2: The Trench by trying to make it a serious action movie instead of a silly creature feature. At least we got a taste of that towards the end.
In cinemas from Friday 4th August