Review: ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Is Meggier, Messier

By Jason Adams | Film | August 5, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | August 5, 2023 |

This summer a major Hollywood film studio took a risk and hired an indie director not at all known for this sort of thing to helm a great big colorful and ridiculous summer blockbuster. One about a larger-than-life figure that little kids have been imagining into existence for generations. The story they came up with would see our characters, a ragtag group of misfits who all love the beach, passing willy-nilly through the barrier between two totally different worlds with most dire consequences—these diametrically-opposed places would begin leaking into one another, spelling imminent doom for both, if they couldn’t be plugged back up but quick.

And you can brush those Barbie thoughts right out of your hair, because we speak here of Meg 2: The Trench. The sequel to 2018’s hit sharksploitation schlock The Meg, this time around the director’s chair has been snatched from Jon Turteltaub by British weirdo Ben Wheatley. Yes, the man who gave us the terrifying cult horrors of Kill List, the comic serial killers of Sightseers, the hallucinogenic 17th-century soldier freak-outs of A Field In England, and Tom Hiddleston covering his naked bits-n-bobs with a magazine in High-Rise, has now been called upon to show Jason Statham riding a jet-ski while throwing explosive harpoons at prehistoric sharks.

And yes that’s sharks, plural. There are three count ‘em three of the monster megalodons this time around—as expert cinephile Randy Meeks said in Scream 2, the first rule of sequels is excess—a bigger and more elaborate everything. And Meg 2: The Trench, which is a bit of a mess (a fun mess but a mess nonetheless), lives and dies by that rule. Starting right there with that clunky title—why they didn’t go the Alien to Aliens route and simply title this movie Megs I will never understand. I won’t hold my breath for Meg³ next, I guess.

But the biggest way in which this movie goes big is by actually being two movies. Bifurcated down its center as if an especially sharp fin swam by and sliced right through the script, Meg 2 feels like 2 sequels in 1. The first half of the film—after some quick set-up (which we’ll step back to in a sec)—sees our scientists trapped on the bottom of the ocean. It’s dark and moody and claustrophobic, and it calls to mind the phenomenally underrated 2020 Kristen Stewart thriller Underwater.

Then the second half of Meg 2 brings everybody back up to the surface (well, some of them anyway) to battle all of the big bad beasties that’ve been unleashed from down below onto a nearby tropical resort (hysterically called Fun Island). That half is bright, it’s goofy, and it brings to mind, well, The Meg. The first one. It even has that cute little Yorkie doggy-paddling again.

These two halves feel deeply at odds with one another, and yet there is something interesting happening there in this friction, and one gets the feeling that this discordance might have been part of what drew an experimentalist like Wheatley to the film (if it wasn’t just the paycheck doing that, at least).

But one also gets the feeling that this was a movie begging on its fins and knees to be rated R too. And you feel that in both halves, in their different ways—in the first hour a moment where the pressure of 25,000 feet of water explodes one character’s cracked diving helmet is scary, but it needed the explicit gore that Ridley Scott used to underline the horror during a similar scene in Prometheus. And then the over-the-top mayhem that explodes in Meg 2’s final half demands some of the red tide that Alexandre Aja summoned forth for the wacky Piranha 3D in 2010. Wheatley, a filmmaker who’s proven an ability to wield cruelty with witty precision, is forced here to straddle a neither-nor space. And you can distinctly sense that strain.

But let’s step back to the beginning—a very fine place to get to in the middle of a review. Jason Statham returns as Jonas, the man who fought a megalodon shark and lived to tell the tale. And those two facts—that his name is Jonas and he fought a Meg previously—are basically all that’s followed his character from the first movie. Jonas, who was a simple rescue diver in the first movie (well, as “simple” as any Jason Statham character carved from marble can ever be considered), is now some sort of inexplicable superman eco-warrior, out scouring the Philippine Sea looking to beat up on litterbug sea pirates.

One can suppose that his previous run-in with a prehistoric monster really made Jonas think about the important things in life and want to change the world for the better… but since the movie doesn’t address his radicalized transformation we won’t linger. One lifestyle shift of his makes a bit more sense—he’s become the co-dad to the now-tween Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai), whose mother Suyin (Li Bingbing) from the first movie has recently, without explanation, passed away (i.e. Li Bingbing didn’t feel like returning for the sequel).

Jonas is co-dadding Meiying alongside Suyin’s brother Jiuming (played by Chinese action superstar Wu Jing), who’s given some brief backstory about being the black sheep before being forced to take the reins of the super science conglomerate his family ran now that his entire family’s dead. It’s all a lot of hand-waving to excuse why this character wasn’t around in the first movie. But thankfully Jiuming just happens to be a genius inventor (not to mention an action superstar) anyway, because the deep-diving super-suits that he’s invented sure do come in handy pretty quick once they all find themselves trapped on the bottom of the ocean.

Meiying, whose former precocity has soured into an irritatingly constant need to be rescued, keeps getting herself into situations where her two dads (and yes, even though it is never addressed, that situation does occasionally seem blissfully just as gay as it reads) have to stop their heroic antics to get teary-eyed—I don’t know that the Meg movies needed more heart, not when there are plenty of other organs on the menu. Bt bless them for giving it a go, I suppose. And so, like Ian Malcolm’s never-again-mentioned daughter in the second Jurassic Park movie, Meiying stows away on a ride she really needn’t be on—slap a “Baby On Board” sticker on that billion dollar submersible, cuz the stakes be raised!

The big yet unexplored changes in Jonas’ character from The Meg to Meg 2 are worth mentioning though, because they highlight the sequel’s biggest issue—its script, which was written by the same trio (Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, and Dean Georgaris) who wrote the first movie. While I’m admittedly keen on its bizarre structure and the tonal shift between its weird mismatched halves, the dialogue is at every turn thuddingly, resoundingly flat. Every line feels like a place-holder. A movie like this is screaming for wit and one-liners, but we get one. One one-liner. I think somebody got confused and thought a “one-liner” meant they got to write one funny line? I dare to think of the magic that a simple dialogue polish by somebody like Paul Rudnick would’ve worked on this thing, and I weep.

Still, for my many complaints, Meg 2 isn’t a lost cause. Somebody behind the scenes had clearly seen the trash-masterpiece that is 2002’s Shark Attack 3: Megalodon and taken notes. (Please I beg you if you have never seen it before, go watch this scene right now.) While a lot of wind has left its sails by its last act, that’s just when the dial gets turned up to eleven, and the movie decides to make us all feel like we’re 10-year-olds playing with our monsters and toy boats in the bathtub again. There’s a solid 15-minute stretch where I realized my face was aching, just because I’d been smiling extra wide for that long. Entirely lost up in the right kind of nonsense that I’d come to this movie to see, I suddenly remembered—tentacles feel good in a place like this.