Meg 2: The Trench
Warner Bros*This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.*
The trailer for Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench promised an even bigger Megalodon than Jon Turtletaub’s 2018 original chomping down a T-Rex, setting the stage for a more outlandish man vs. shark picture than the first film. And when the meg action starts to go down, it does get semi-enjoyable. But it happens far too late into the movie for it to enthrall, as 90% of the film is spent setting up a human storyline with almost no payoff whatsoever, and no one in the audience will give a damn.
Let’s be honest: when audiences buy a ticket for The Meg, they want to see Jason Statham duke it out against a large CGI megalodon shark. The 2018 film did that, even if it was relatively inconsistent. When the shark action began, the film was a hoot. Statham’s self-aware portrayal of Jonas Taylor sold the film as an exciting studio blockbuster, released during a month when movies usually get quietly dumped. No one who sits down in front of THE MEG gives a damn about THE HUMANS. And yet, Wheatley and screenwriters Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris focus most of the runtime on the human characters who uncover a shady mining operation secretly financed by Mana One, unbeknownst to Taylor, Jiuming Zhang (Wu Jing) and Mac (Cliff Curtis).
Does this have anything to do with the three megs attacking a resort? Sure, but it takes so long to get to where 95% of the trailer plucked footage from. Essentially, a mole working at Mana One sabotages the submarines exploring the trench, and the main characters are forced to walk underwater to the mining station, where sea creatures come out of the deep after an explosion ruptures a part of the trench. This entire section is ripe with a plot that keeps overcomplexifying itself as if audiences should care about who lives or dies (it doesn’t help that the most surprising and hilarious death was spoiled in its trailer) instead of being about Jason Statham and Wu Jing finding bigger megs and creatures that unsurprisingly go to the surface and start endangering humans. That’s what the entire movie should’ve been, but none of the mining storyline makes a shred of sense or feels urgent enough that the audience will invest themselves.
And it wouldn’t have been that big of a problem had the underwater action looked good, but Wheatley and cinematographer Haris Zambarokoulos light them so that it’s impossible to see a thing. Add a poorly-conceived 3D presentation, and the finished product is even murkier and more imperceptible with those awful cardboard glasses slapped in the audience’s eyes. Underwater photography shouldn’t look this dim and dull, even if characters are literally exploring the depths of the ocean. James Wan’s Aquaman showed filmmakers how to make the sea bright and colorful, even while shooting “trench” sequences. There’s no excuse for Wheatley to take the lazy way out and craft action sequences so inert they’ll put anyone watching to sleep.
The photography does improve when the titular meg(s) start attacking a resort aptly named Fun Island, particularly when Statham rides a Jetski and harpoons a meg on a tidal wave – which is arguably the coolest moment of the entire film – but Wheatley always cuts back to the human drama instead of giving their sharks their time to shine. The weakest parts of the 2018 movie were the poorly-written human scenes, but Turtletaub more than made up for those ineptitudes when he made the star of his film (the shark, not Statham) shine in its final act. Instead of doubling down on what worked in the original, Wheatley does the opposite in the sequel and doubles down on elements of the first that didn’t work. When the shark action does appear, as cool as it looks, it feels completely weightless, bogged down by the unnecessarily complicated plot that came before.
Why couldn’t this sequel’s logline have been “bigger sharks and other sea creatures attack humans. Jonas Taylor and a new character, Jiuming Zhang, team up to stop them” instead of whatever the hell the finished product came up with? Jing is one of the biggest Chinese stars in cinema history (he’s the biggest one right now). After starring in some of the most profitable Chinese films of all time, including the Wolf Warrior series he also directed, alongside The Wandering Earth 1 and 2, Jing makes his Hollywood debut and teams up with Statham for his first foray in Western cinema. It’s a match made in heaven, and yet they fall completely flat together. The two have no sense of chemistry. While Statham completely phones it this time and realizes the mess he’s in, Jing overacts and oversells every moment he’s in. It doesn’t help for his character that he consistently fakes out his death multiple times, to which it becomes a running gag.
The only actors who infuse some personality in the proceedings are Curtis and Page Kennedy, who reprise their roles from the original film as Mac and DJ. Wheatley tries to pair them up with a buddy-cop routine, which mostly works. Kennedy’s well-timed humor and major kickassery in some of the film’s tighter action scenes make their scenes a breeze. Still, the rest of the characters are massively underdeveloped, including Skyler Samuels’ Jess, Melissanti Mahut’s Rigas, and Sienna Guillory’s Hillary Driscoli – the latter adding absolutely nothing to the movie and whose arc is the catalyst of the whole mining operation ordeal. Sophia Cai’s Meiying also returns, and she becomes the film’s biggest damsel in distress. The two human characters always revolve around her, and she gets in trouble. The jig gets tiresome very fast.
Had Meg 2: The Trench been about THE MEG and not THE HUMANS, it could’ve been one of the better August blockbusters in recent memory. But no one seems to care, especially Wheatley, who could’ve used this gig to truly flex his genre muscles to full effect (Free Fire remains as spectacular as ever) with a splash of horror when the characters explore the trench. However, he never does anything remotely interesting with its aesthetic and the Statham/Jing pairing. It could’ve been a rematch between Jonas and three Megalodons for the ages, yet it fails to make the audiences invested in that aspect. But, hey, at least the meg is bigger, right? Right?!?