Movie Review: ‘Meg 2: The Trench’

Director: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Jason Statham, Wu Jing, Sophia Cai, Cliff Curtis, Page Kennedy, Sergio Peris Mencheta, Skyler Samuels

Plot: Jason Statham is now an eco-mercenary, infiltrating and targeting operations causing environmental harm. One such operation disrupts the trench that houses prehistoric creatures and unleashes various beasts upon the surface.

Review: You can almost see the production process that led to cameras rolling on this adventure. The Meg performed well enough at the box office for an immediate sequel to become a good business decision and things. A brainstorming session was initiated, then the top three ideas were mushed together into a story outline and that was that. We’re all for a schlocky sequel to a schlocky movie but this madcap series of events doesn’t give itself much reason to exist.

Jonas Taylor, the name given to Jason Statham in this series, seems to have expanded his resume to include secret agent missions of boats dumping toxic waste. This shift in character motivation doesn’t had much to the story, more a reason to maintain the character’s outlaw status from the original film. It also seems that Suyin died in between movies, so Statham is now the adoptive father of Meiying (Cai, returning to reprise the role surprisingly enough), and they’ve been teamed with her uncle Jiuming (Jing). Along the way they have also caught a megalodon and have been attempting to train it.

After all that surface level character develop is laid out, we get to the real storytelling – robot suits! After some flashy tech scenes with robot suits punching through concrete blocks, our characters (along with some Red Shirts) set out in a couple of submarines to explore the Mariana Trench, separated out from the ocean as a whole by a thermocline layer, only to discover some villainous types running an illegal mining operation. Now that Statham’s primary trait is now environmentalism, he’s angry about this, but the plot thickens when the bad environmentalism causes a breach in the thermocline layer and allowing all manner of prehistoric animals to get loose.

So far so good, plenty of silly potential. This is when the fractured nature of the script starts to muck up the tone. Half the movie follows the group trapped at the bottom of the Mariana Trench with limited air and time to trek to a safe spot. There could be real dread and tension during this part of the movie but it never achieves the edge-of-the-seat feel it could given the set-up. There’s not much in the way of action though, as the deaths lean more into the realm of horror, but the next part of the film more than makes up for. A number of megalodons reach the surface world along with a giant octopus and a bunch of scrabbling amphibious guys who like to do the long grass but from Jurassic Park 2. Mayhem ensues.

For all the Jason Statham jousting giant sharks on jet-skis, none of it manages to engage the viewer. Any real stunts being performed are buried under CGI and fake water. With most blockbusters becoming indecipherable layers of fakery and characters with no distinct features, it all washes over the audience without leaving any impact. It doesn’t help that they couldn’t decide which character was going to fulfil what roles, so they all get to get everything. Everyone gets a some funny quicks, witty one-liners, crazy action moments and previously unmentioned special skills. It falls into the same trap that the Fast and Furious movies have where the characters are interchangeable. It’s not an ensemble cast when everyone is the same witty action character who will turn out to have survived the crash they were involved in.

Between this and 65 we’ve done really poorly in the realm of big budget monster adventures. Whilst we didn’t write up Adam Driver’s whacky dino hijinks due to extreme boredom, we hope that there’s still a chance for The Meg to get something really fun and exciting out of this. They just need to pick one idea and a consistent tone and have fun in that space, not make everything bigger and bigger to the point that it doesn’t mean anything.

Review: FOUR out of TEN