The Meg 2: The Trench - Review

Rating: 2 out of 5

AUDIENCES had every right to expect an outrageously schlocky B-movie style extravaganza when The Meg 2: The Trench hit cinemas, especially given the presence of in-form director Ben Wheatley orchestrating the mayhem. Sadly, the sequel fails to deliver anything approaching a thrill.

Rather, it’s a confused mess of a movie that struggles with any real sense of identity.

Wheatley, who has made a name for himself with genre-bending, muscular fare such as Kill List, Sightseers and Free Fire, seems caught between two minds as to whether to make a creature feature worthy of the beasts he has at his disposable, or a more standard action movie befitting the type of role that is usually synonymous with leading man Jason Statham.

By attempting both, he never manages to deliver a satisfying version of either, instead allowing each genre trope to trip over itself and upset the momentum of the movie.

The plot is incidental and far too jumbled for its own good. It picks up as Statham’s all-action shark hunter turned ocean defender Jonas Taylor does his best James Bond impression by busting a tanker and its crew for dumping nuclear waste into the water.

Thereafter, he’s channelling Indiana Jones by piloting a submersible on a research trip 25,000 feet below sea level that places him in direct contact with more megs and various other prehistoric sea creatures. With a team including his step-daughter (Sophia Cai) in tow (as well as her uncle, played by Wu Jing), Taylor soon comes to realise they’re not alone in the depths, as a rival human team is also conducting its own research and then determines to sabotage the whole endeavour.

Before long, team Jonas is battling against the odds to return to the surface, while inadvertently setting loose various megs, a giant octopus and some Jurassic Park-style critters, who belatedly crash-land on a remote Chinese party island for the film’s supposedly uproarious finale.

To be fair, there are some comically entertaining gonzo ideas on show, which gleefully steal from, or parody, other creature flicks of its style – whether it’s the idea of taming a megalodon Jurassic World-style, or nodding to the shark killing ideology employed at the climax of Jaws 2. But these are too few and far between.

Mostly, characters behave in genuinely inept fashion, making it easier to route for the creatures, which in turn aren’t given the screen-time their design or talents requires.

The first half of the movie is particularly prone to this criticism, with too much of the underwater sequence poorly lit and making it difficult to see. The second half, which allows for more daytime action, does start to show off the beasts a little more, but tones down the ferocity of the carnage and dumbs down the action.

If anything, the film feels Jurassic Park-lite, struggling to deliver either the tension or the terror of the Spielberg masterpiece or any of its subsequent sequels.

Again, coming from a filmmaker of Wheatley’s standing, that’s disappointing. But even if the intention of The Meg 2 was merely to be as outrageous and stupid as possible, then it still comes up short by failing to deliver characters that know how to channel this, or appear as believable or even human.

Statham, for his part, seems to be playing it straight, whereas opting to roll his tongue into his cheek and channel his Spy persona would perhaps have worked a lot better. It would have nodded to the audience that he was in on the joke.

There is some of that in the work that Wu Jing and Cliff Curtis (as another member of the team) do, and they get to share most of the on-screen chemistry that the film has to offer. It also shows how much more fun the movie could have been if it had settled on this tone.

But instead, Wheatley tries to flip-flop between gung-ho action and B-movie absurdity with increasingly diminishing returns, selling the film’s biggest assets – the megs – a long way short, along with his audience.