MEG 2: THE TRENCH

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17 Apr 2024

REVIEWS
★★
When is dumb fun just dumb? When is homage just stealing? Meg 2: The Trench – and the definition of a un-called for sequel – answers on both counts with with two soggy thumbs in its own wet face. As directed by the once interesting Ben Wheatley, the film plods along with listless energy, tugging along a desperately shipwrecked cast with all the enthusiasm of an industrial trawler. To its minor credit, things pick up in a last ditch dash of bonkers. This is a film of thirds. The first third is poor. The second is even worse. Only in the final third does Meg 2 find any semblance of the batshit mojo it should have enjoyed from the off and only by pilfering from the back catalogue. Jaws was never really about the shark, Meg 2 is but frequently seems to forget it.
More problematic still would be the film’s all too frequent misremembering of its actual purpose. Nobody enters a Jason Statham v Megalodon B-movie in search of dramatic heft and potent socio-political commentary. This is meant to be fun. Sure, Meg 2 gets there in the end but must the journey to yet one more polka dot beach of holidaymaker prey be quite so thunderously dull? Even Statham looks bored stiff. Not that he’s given so much to play with. Here, character development is less about nuanced progression than wild tonal left turns. Round two resurrects his deep sea diving Jonas Taylor with none of the first film’s derring-do and charisma. He hasn’t even the frisson of romantic tension to ripple from, owing to the quiet killing off of Li Bingbing’s Zhang Suyin. Precious little of their chemistry remains in Jonas relationship with Zhang’s orphaned daughter Meiying, who is again played by an all grown up Sophia Cai.
It’s not like things don’t start with a bit of a rollick. The prehistoric preamble – which amounts to little more than a spin on the ‘there’s always a bigger fish’ gag – is actually rather fun. Then we flush through to the present day. Five years on from his last run in with a 75ft behemoth, Jonas now works for the Zhang Institute, a corporation with no obvious raison d’etre but who have retained a megalodon in their collection for scientific study. It’s all very blatantly Jurassic World-y, right down to the attempts by company director Jiuming Zhang – an uncomfortably cast Wu Jing – to tame and train the beast. Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before the thing escapes. Too many people loudly announce that such a feat is impossible for it not to be. Only, Wheatley weirdly fudges this development. So much so that a viewer could be forgiven for not realising when it actually happens. Certainly, nobody at the facility seems to.
Instead, the Meg swims off into superfluity, giving way to a dismally ill conceived sub plot about illegal submarine mining. Yawn. On risibly pithy grounds, Jonas, Jiuming and Meiying are sent on a deep dive into the titular Trench, which is home to a monstrous cornucopia of man-eating sea beasts. They’re accompanied by expendables, of course, each more drab than the last. It’s hard to pin down the woe solely to poor writing or acting, indicative of a middle ground. It’s an oddly bloodless spate of killings that gradually wipes them out, likely part of the film’s painfully obvious attempts at finding global appeal. See also the film’s linguistic juggling. In one scene, a well liked team member suffers a pressure induced head explosion. There’s not a brain cell in sight and she’s never mentioned again.
While the sea creatures themselves are well enough rendered, the ocean floor sequence around them is dreadfully executed. In lieu of actual talent, Wheatley drops the lighting and has his cast bob up and down in painfully choreographed slow motion. As for the under the sea-GI, it’s the worst out of Hollywood this year. A more compelling script might have found a way to muscle through but Meg 2 hasn’t that. You’d be rooting for the reptiles if only you could see the damn things. There’s a giant squid down there too but even that fails to spook when framed as a side act to the human villainy at play.
It’s a merciful leap to the surface that finally hits the mark. Out of the pits, glee bursts forth with pedalo based massacres, harpoon dodging and any instance of Statham single-handedly taking on the three megaladons at large. Out of nowhere, Melissanthi Mahut and Page Kennedy stride into some terrific buddy comedy, while mighty nods to Jaws 2 and Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors land with aplomb. None of this is to say that Meg 2 transforms into a hit in its final stretch but rather that it finally, with minutes to spare, begins to feel like the dumb fun it should always have been. Alas, too little too late.
T.S