John Turteltaub’s The Meg may not have been a very good movie, but it was a massively successful one nonetheless. Despite conspiring to turn the simple, wondrous, and unhinged conceit of “Jason Statham battles a giant prehistoric shark” into something incredibly bland and formulaic, it still earned over half a billion dollars at the box office. Naturally, a sequel was inevitably announced, but Meg 2: The Trench has somehow managed to sink even lower than its predecessor.
While nobody was expecting an avant garde experimental successor, the hiring of Ben Wheatley as director looked to be a masterstroke on paper. After all, this is the singular filmmaker behind such wildly varied but equally engaging features as Kill List, A Field in England, High-Rise, Free Fire, and In the Earth. Sure, not all of them managed to hit their intended targets, but you can’t deny that each of them are unquestionably the work of their creator and architect in chief, something that can’t be said of his jump to the studio system.
A couple of eye-catching shots aside, Meg 2 could have literally been made by anybody, with the entire running time coated in the sheen of artifice and murky CGI soup that’s neutered many a blockbuster. Obviously, it would be ridiculous to expect a sequel about multiple Megalodons (and even a giant squid) to be beholden to practical effects, but the first hour of The Trench – which fittingly largely unfolds in the titular wasteland – is the usual walking, talking, expository sludge we’ve been served up countless times before, with nary a flash of creativity or artistic flourish to make it stand out from the pack.
The opening act – which feels as though it drags on for an eternity – is endemic of the film’s problems. Admittedly, there’s a zippy opening action sequence that reintroduces Statham’s lead (Jonas Taylor, in case you forgot, but it’s basically Statham doing Statham) as a badass eco-warrior, and then we’re straight off to exposition town.
With Li Bingbing written out of the franchise, the focus falls on Wu Jing to take the place of resident Chinese megastar, which he very much is after his recent appearances in Wolf Warrior 2, The Wandering Earth and its sequel, and two-part war epic The Battle at Lake Changjin combined to earn an astonishing $3.7 billion at the box office. He’s essentially the co-lead of sorts, which means he’s tasked to carry just as much of the load as his chromed-domed opposite number.
Six years on from the opener, Bingbing’s Suyin Zhang is off-handedly mentioned as being dead, with Jing’s uncle Jiuming and Statham’s Taylor assuming co-parenting duties for Sophia Cai’s now 14 year-old Meiying. She wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps and explore the depths of the ocean, they say she’s not ready, she does it anyway, and then things end up going sideways. Jiuming says he’s trained a Meg, everybody doubts him, it ends up escaping, and then things end up going sideways. Rinse and repeat, the narrative is happy to cut and paste the most basic storylines and subplots imaginable.
Clearly, imagination is not Meg 2‘s strongest suit, which becomes even clearer when a conspiracy presents itself that’s incredibly easy to unravel, which it then does itself about 15 minutes later. From there, human enemies are thrown into the mix as Sergio Peris-Mencheta’s mercenary Montes surreptitiously mines the deepest recesses of the seabed for profit, but it’s nigh-on impossible to care when everyone is so one-dimensional.
The scenes in the trench are obligated to be dark given they unfold in a place where natural light is very hard to come by, but there’s no sense of urgency or propulsion in watching cannon fodder characters get gobbled up by inconsistently-rendered CGI beasties. It happens because the rules of big budget filmmaking say so, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with ticking boxes that need to be ticked, it would have been nice were Wheatley able to use a different color of pen from everybody else.
The Meg has obvious potential to be a fun franchise, but nobody involved has ever seemed remotely interested in the two clearest directions with which to achieve that goal. On one hand, there’s the opportunity to lean into horror and craft a ludicrously expensive exercise in aquatic terror that embraces the fact nature’s oldest and largest killing machines are back with a vengeance and hungrier than ever, which was never going to happen when a PG-13 rating is required to justify the expense.
On the other hand, embracing the camp silliness of it all – along the lines of the gratuitously glorious Piranha 3D – and planting tongue firmly in cheek would comfortably ratchet up the entertainment factor. Sure, there are a couple of those moments planted throughout – because you can’t not take the opportunity to have Statham riding a jet ski wielding homemade harpoon explosives and taking on a trio of Megalodons by himself should it arise – but The Trench continues taking itself far too seriously for the most part.
In the cruelest twist of irony, the grandstanding third act finale literally unfolds at a place called “Fun Island,” with everything including the kitchen sink being thrown into the mix. There’s sharks, dinosaurs, a cephalopod, jet skis, helicopters, guns, explosions, helicopters, blood, teeth, a recurring “does the dog die?” gag, and almost anything else you can think of, but it’s all so haphazardly edited and ineffectually staged that even the money shots seen in the trailer are barely worth the paper they’re printed on.
Wheatley no doubt has it in his toolbox to deliver an action-packed extravaganza that doesn’t just feel as if it was the result of a mandated list of bullet points handed to him by the studio, but Meg 2: The Trench ain’t it. There’s more sharks, more Statham, and a proven director of eccentric genre-bent oddities at the helm, and yet it’s somehow even worse than the first one.
Disappointing
Ben Wheatley's blockbuster debut reduces him to an anonymous bystander in a sequel that's inexplicably weaker than its predecessor. If we get 'Meg 3,' then somebody needs to remember these things are supposed to be fun.