‘The Meg 2: The Trench’ Review: More Sharks, Less Bite – Variety
The movie-mad phenomenon of “Barbenheimer” has been an exciting reminder that audiences can nonetheless embrace the movie-theater expertise, turning up in superior droves after they’re supplied one thing new and adventurous. It’s additionally been highly effective proof that movies that aren’t formulaic sequels can reach a approach that too many latest cookie-cutter franchise movies haven’t. However will all that go down as a lesson for the long run? Or an enormous anomaly?
We in all probability shouldn‘t child ourselves. “The Meg 2: The Trench” is a trivial (if not unwatchable) piece of semi-preposterous big-budget junk. However arriving simply two weeks after “Barbenheimer,” it stands as a pesky signifier of what mainstream films have been for the final 40 years, and what they’ll seemingly proceed to be. A cash-grab sequel to a cynical knockoff? Verify. One which goals squarely on the lowest widespread denominator? Verify. Visible results that steamroll what was as soon as referred to as character improvement? Verify. “The Meg 2” is numbingly formulaic, promiscuously spinoff and, for a number of stretches (just like the over-the-top third act), diverting in its very shamelessness. It’s, in different phrases, all an August film actually must be. However there’s a approach that the road between August films and flicks, interval, is rising thinner daily.
5 summers in the past, “The Meg” was an oversize, underimagined “Jaws” knockoff that didn’t have the chutzpah to be greater than a hoky piece of blockbuster nostalgia. However “The Meg 2” tries to up the ante, in order that for all its patched-together ridiculousness we’re meant to observe it and assume: Have a look at what a wild smorgasbord it’s! A prelude, set throughout the Cretaceous interval 65 million years in the past, presents us with the dino model of dog-eat-dog — on this case, it’s carnivorous sea lizard eats wriggly fish, then a T. rex exhibits up and does its factor, till the true apex predator arrives: a megalodon, the prehistoric shark that makes the nice white shark of “Jaws” appear like a minnow. Leaping onto the seaside, the meg chows down on that T. rex as if it had been snack meals.
There are a number of megs in “The Meg 2,” together with a raised-in-captivity one named Haiqi. They glide by means of the ocean with bared triangle tooth and scarred our bodies that look carved out of historic stone. There’s additionally an enormous octopus, plus these primeval lizards that appear to have stepped out of “Jurassic Park: Pet Store World.” And there’s Jason Statham, trying solely barely much less lizardy as Jonas Taylor, the rescue diver-now-turned-Bondian eco-warrior. The movie additionally options the Chinese language martial-arts movie celebrity Wu Jing, who as Statham’s colleague doesn’t get a lot in the best way of motion scenes, although his character does get to point out off his abilities as a meg whisperer. There’s a supporting forged of human shark meat, in addition to a witty actor or two (like Web page Kennedy) combined into the B-movie genericism.
If you wish to know what a film would sound like had been it written totally by AI, look no additional than “The Meg 2.” The movie has three screenwriters (Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris), however the issue isn’t simply that the dialogue they’ve provide you with is leaden, or that the film is sprinkled with discordant low-camp-meets-inept traces like “Earlier than you begin whining concerning the ecosystem, who cares?” It’s that all the pieces we see or hear is purposeful, a collection of arduous nuts and bolts jammed collectively.
For some time, “The Meg 2” is a deep-sea-dive-gone-wrong thriller, waterlogged division, as Statham’s Jonas leads a analysis expedition in a pair of submersibles all the way down to the Mariana Trench, 25,000 toes beneath the floor. The explorers encounter a secret station that’s been arrange by a rogue mining operation. Saboteurs from Jonas’s institute are concerned, however when he leads his group on a three-kilometer escape stroll by means of the deep, or they need to battle their approach out of the mining station, the movie descends into undersea motion clichés. That a whole faculty of megs are swimming round, searching for one thing to eat, provides little to the suspense.
Meiying (Sophia Cai), Jonas’s 14-year-old daughter, has snuck onto the submersible, however the affectionate bickering between the 2 of them by no means provides as much as a lot. “We do what’s in entrance of us,” Jonas instructs Meiying, “then we do the following factor.” That feels like how a pc writes a screenplay. “The Meg 2” plods alongside till it reaches Enjoyable Island, a tropical resort that gives a pastel background and loads of extras for the movie’s creature-feature climax.
That is why we go to a “Meg” film: to see Statham experience a yellow speedboat, armed with three chemical harpoons, because the megs chase him in formation, or to see a huge tentacle attain out of the ocean to battle a helicopter, or to see the villains get chomped with a well-timed out-of-the-blueness. “The Meg 2” was directed by the British indie cult style filmmaker Ben Wheatley (“Excessive-Rise”), and within the culminating episode, no less than, he scales up successfully. Which isn’t fairly the identical as making a superb movie. The “Meg” films have now shot past flagrant “Jaws” nostalgia to grow to be their very own semi-tongue-in-cheek trash factor. They’re type of like “Godzilla” films minus the atomic-bomb subtext. They make Godzilla look deep.
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