by Jason Mack, Contributing Writer
Meg 2: The Trench is sunk by its insatiable thirst for profitability and the strong desire to please everyone that it’s unlikely to please anyone.
This movie should be right up my alley. Jaws is one of my all-time favorite movies, I liked The Meg despite its flaws and rank it among the top five shark movies, and my wedding ring even contains fragments of megalodon tooth fossils. Despite all that working in its favor, Meg 2: The Trench couldn’t quite grab me.
It’s important to point out this movie isn’t notably bad or good. It’s two hours of just okay, but that’s not the sweet spot for a shark movie. They have many paths to success, such as being great like Jaws, being flawed but supported by an intriguing concept like The Meg or Deep Blue Sea, or being so bad they are funny like Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. This one misses the mark on all accounts.
The Meg works because it takes a wild concept and tackles it with sincerity. It has character development. It presents an interesting idea in a unique way. There are serious issues with the script and questionable performances, but whether great or not, they are all committed. The sequel brings little to none of that. There is no character development. Several performances feel phoned in. The plot definitely gets crazy, but not in a fresh way.
So why can’t I bring myself to hate it? It likely goes back to the thirst for profitability. Many middling movies feel like two or three movie ideas accidentally crammed into one. With Meg 2: The Trench, the feel of multiple different movies seems like a deliberate decision. It’s the sampler platter of movies. It’s not cohesive as a dish, but whatever your tastes, you are probably going to find at least one thing you like.
This hedging of bets sets everyone up to come away feeling like there were parts they enjoyed, even if the film doesn’t land as a whole. For me, it was the time spent in the trench. There are unique sci-fi elements in that section reminiscent of The Abyss. An entire movie spent deep in the trench could have been great.
However, the mustache-twirling level of villains coming into play ruins the potential. Some might enjoy that element. The villains feel reminiscent of old-school James Bond movies. If it were paired with some James Bond levels of crazy gadgets, cheesy dialogue, and over-the-top action, there could be some fun in it.
While it might not approach the wildness of James Bond action, Jason Statham’s Jonas Taylor does inexplicably become an action star. His fearlessness in rescuing others from the meg in the first movie was already pushing it, but this one opens with him displaying Jackie Chan levels of fighting prowess, taking on six guys at once without flinching. The development of him and Page Kennedy’s DJ into action heroes between movies is about the closest thing you get to character development.
That is unless you count unexplained death as development. I don’t even consider this a spoiler because it is hinted at for a few seconds in the early portion of the movie, and then never addressed again. The first movie bends over backwards to force Jonas and Li Bingbing’s Suyin into romantic entanglement, and she was unceremoniously written out of this one, which is presented basically as an Easter egg in the background and never touched on again. You have to wonder if there was some bad blood there. If she were simply busy, they easily could have written her character out of the movie without killing her.
It doesn’t even facilitate any plot points. Jonas doesn’t have any new romantic interest set up. There is no conflict in his co-parenting of Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai) with her uncle Jiuming (Jing Wu). And Meiying does not have any plot driven by the loss of her mother. She has one throwaway line asking a meg if it misses its mother, and that’s it.
The final quadrant tackled aggressively by this movie is the obvious one of the anarchy of megalodons attacking random beachgoers; the movie goes hard into this for the last third. Maybe it will be enough to amuse some people, but I found it underwhelming. It doesn’t help that any interesting meg moments are all in the trailer. A point-of-view shot from inside the mouth of a meg is kind of cool, but aside from those couple seconds, the rest is just simple kills. The megs also feel ancillary to what is going on with other creatures brought to the forefront in equally underwhelming fashion.
Wasted opportunities abound in this movie. The biggest comes from setting up an interesting premise early on that Jiuming believes he has a special bond with the megalodon in captivity. There were so many ways to take this. It channels some serious Nope vibes. There could have been a plot point of him fighting with Jonas about wanting to protect that meg even if they take down the other two, but it doesn’t happen. The concept comes back up briefly late in the movie in an unsatisfying way.
I also have to point out a glaring issue of logic in the movie. It is clearly nonsense how it is explained that Jonas can free dive in the pressurized depths 25,000 feet below when the plot necessitates it as the only means of survival. Apparently clearing your sinuses while you do it is enough to keep you alive. It’s nonsense, but in a movie like this you can suspend some scientific logic when they address it to facilitate the plot. My problem is that minutes before this happens, a character is in danger of imploding due to a helmet that is cracking while the depressurizing chamber finishes up. There is plenty of time to explain this sinus logic, but instead the character’s fate is left up to chance and the integrity of the splintering glass.
The design of everything in the trench is solid, but otherwise, the production value feels like it takes a hit this time around. The CGI is worse. The sets are much less intriguing. We at least get another lingering shot of a meg and a person in frame together to feel the scale, but that facility design is boring compared to the setup in the first movie.
Much like in The Meg, The Trench suffers from pushing for a PG-13 rating. I’m not a fan of excessive gore, but the kills in this are much more implied than illustrated. As a result, they almost don’t feel real, and certainly don’t hold any weight. An R rating and a story closer to the novels could have been so much better.
Despite spelling out so many negatives, it’s hard to hate this movie. It’s never great, and it’s never bad. It just kind of exists.
Rating: It’s Just Okay
Meg 2: The Trench is currently playing in theaters
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