I was one of those “lunatics” unironically looking forward to this sequel. I liked The Meg (2018); despite its flaws, it was a fun shark movie with decent CGI and charismatic Jason Statham. Again, I judge movies on their own merits, so it objectively was a B/C movie at best, but, in its genre, it did its job. But Meg 2: The Trench… How can someone miss so badly?
I hate to do this, but I am not sure whether someone like Ben Wheatley was the best choice for this sequel. I have only seen one of his movies (High-Rise (2015)) but even judging by his filmography, he’s never done a movie that was as CGI-heavy as Meg 2. And that was my biggest issue. Those scenes that were supposed to be the highlight of this film ended up being badly edited, all over the place and mostly shot in such dark that you can’t hardly see anything.
The perfect example of this was the scene of our heroes being stranded at the bottom of the ocean and having to go “for a walk” to save themselves. Now, I won’t go into the practicalities of whether they would survive such an amount of pressure for so long. Meg 2 is a movie about pre-historic sharks coming to the surface, so I will give them some wiggle room in that department. But that scene (that, in my opinion, should have been the “key” scene of this film) was executed so messily that it quickly lost all of its impact. Why? Because you are supposed to be afraid for our heroes, they are out in the open; there are multiple Megs around and other deadly creatures. But since you can’t really see anything, the movie goes the expected route of “audio horror”, where we get jump scare sounds, but many times, I couldn’t see what I was supposed to be afraid of. Some scenes felt like the “jump scare” sounds were one or two seconds too soon before the image on the screen got enough light for us to see either a shark or some other creature going after our heroes.
The rest of the film is also weird, as we spend quite a lot of time on company takeover…? Yeah, in a movie that should have been about: “Hey, we have multiple Megs!” we have this generic plot of “profits before people” and backstabbing we have seen before done better. It almost feels like the producers behind the first movie took all the wrong lessons, why the first movie was received fairly well (again, for the type of movie it is) and most importantly, it made over half a billion dollars at the box office! But this sequel seemed like they wanted to “ground it” in reality, and no, this is not why we (or at least I) liked the first one. We need silly movies having some resemblance of a story to get us to Jason fighting multiple Megs, the end. But we can’t have most of the film (called Meg 2) not being that.
The other thing that also didn’t work as well is the humour. Most (if not all) jokes felt forced; the only one who stood out comedically was Page Kennedy. I really hope this man got paid handsomely, as he was the reason some of the jokes worked, and he (alongside Jason) seemed to be the only other individual who understood what movie they were making. Everybody else felt out of place. I don’t think everyone else was awful, they all felt off, weird and out of place; the same as this entire movie felt off. What was supposed to be a “fun time with monster sharks, take two” became a “not-so-fun time with a bunch of bad-lit CGI”. But at least the last 20 minutes were ok…?
Overall, Meg 2: The Trench was a disappointment. I am often quick to defend these silly movies because I don’t mind when films are just that, dumb, silly and fun adventures. That is as long as you give me something to defend. In this film, the suspense felt artificial, the humour was almost non-existent, the CGI was okay at best, and what was supposed to be one of those “big, dumb fun” films turned into just dumb. I guess you could say it was big, but it definitely wasn’t fun. And you need “fun” when you decide to make a sequel about a pre-historic shark that survived at the bottom of the ocean for millions of years.
That’s all for this one! Did you see it? What did you think about it? Let me know!
Until next time,
Luke