These Meg movies should be a lot more fun than they actually are. The first one had a couple of fun scenes, and was competent enough, but also felt a little long and dreary and should be way more stupid for a movie about a prehistoric shark-eating people. But, it also made half a billion dollars on what seems like, now, a pretty modest budget of only $150 million or so.
So here we are with Meg 2: The Trench, a movie apparently shot with cameras that give it that oh-so-desired washed-out look instead of having actual colors. Oh, now, the characters in the movie talk about all the wonderful colors down in the aforementioned Trench, but we, the audience, only get washed out gray. It’s a dismal-looking movie, which is appropriate because it sets the tone for the actual plot.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking, “Um, it’s a movie about a giant shark, who cares, just have fun!” Yeah, that’s exactly what I tried to do, but Meg 2: The Trench commits the worst sin a movie about a giant prehistoric shark can make: it’s kind of boring. I went in looking for an audacious good time and, instead, I got a movie about rock smugglers.
After an opening depicting CGI prehistoric life eating each other, we get to Jason Statham’s Jonas Taylor back in action … on some sort of cargo ship that’s illegally dumping radioactive waste. Jonas is there to stop them, but immediately fails and has to be rescued. But what this scene sets up is … well, nothing. It serves no purpose whatsoever in Meg 2: The Trench‘s already bloated two-hour running time. I take that back, it sets up one thing. Since this movie, like the first, is co-produced by China, we learn through a line of dialogue that the Chinese government really cares about protecting the oceans that I’m sure had to be shoehorned into this movie somehow.
Jiuming (Wu Jing), has developed a submersible craft capable of traveling through the area that divides the rest of the world from the Trench where all the prehistoric creatures want to live. Why do they want to go there? You know, it doesn’t matter. And it wouldn’t be a movie if they didn’t go there and it sounds like a fun thing to watch. Well, it’s at this point I knew we were in trouble when, instead of fighting sea creatures, our team encounters a mining colony roughly five miles below sea level. You see, some of the stones down there are very rare and worth a lot of money. (Statham’s character literally says, “Did you say ‘b’? As in billion?”)
So for some ungodly reason I will never understand, most of this movie takes place on an abandoned underwater mining colony as the surviving members of the team try to figure a way to get back to the surface, while also fighting militant underwater miners. Oh, yes, one by one a few team members get killed. But it’s kind of startling how quickly the pain and anguish subsides so the characters can make a few jokes and have a laugh. One character in particular has a very grizzly and horrifying death and the surviving characters scream in anguish for about 30 seconds. A couple minutes later everyone is laughing and these dead characters are never mentioned again. The tone of Meg 2: The Trench is its biggest enemy. At its heart, it wants to be “dumb fun.” But someone involved in production (I’m going to guess it’s a country’s government) doesn’t want that and there’s a lot more taking things seriously in this movie than there needs to be.
This is a drab movie. And it, somehow, was directed by Ben Wheatley, which sounds made up. It would be like if all of a sudden, with little fanfare, Jim Jarmusch decided to direct The Pope’s Exorcist 2. (Okay, I’d watch that.) And look, I’m not the biggest fan of Wheatley’s movies (to be fair, a lot of people are), but his movies certainly aren’t drab. That’s what I don’t understand. I thought a Ben Wheatley Meg movie might actually be interesting. It is not.
Meg 2: The Trench finally picks up a bit during the last 20 minutes or so when they wind up at a resort named Fun Island. Why this movie didn’t just go straight to Fun Island and skip all the nonsense about the rock smugglers is beyond me. But by the time they get there, it’s too late. If Meg 2: The Trench had this kind of energy throughout, maybe there’s some “dumb fun” to be had, but the life has already been sucked out of the room by this point. To the point, I kind of started feeling sorry for the Megs. I wasn’t necessarily rooting for the Megs, I just felt bad they didn’t get to be in a better or dumber movie.
‘Meg 2: The Trench’ opens Friday, August 4th. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
