For a certain class of cinephile, the news that Ben Wheatley (Ben Wheatley! “Kill List” and “Free Fire” and “A Field in England” Ben Wheatley!) was directing the sequel to Jon Turteltaub’s 2018 hit “The Meg” could only be met with joy and confusion. If nothing else, it suggested a big-budget film about Jason Statham fighting massive prehistoric sharks that would actually be fucked up, creepy and scary and weird and spine-tingling. Alas, “Meg 2: The Trench” is none of those things, and only occasionally (perhaps even accidentally) fun, yet another seemingly unassailable combination of story and filmmaker that fails to capitalize on any of its obvious promises.
It’s never a good sign when you’re checking your watch during a film — especially a film built on the inherently entertaining elevator pitch of “Jason Statham fights massive prehistoric sharks!” — but audiences will likely find themselves doing just that during the first interminable hour of “Meg 2: The Trench.” At nearly two hours, “Meg 2” spends more than half of its running time cycling through a dull, bizarrely convoluted plot before delivering anything actually amusing. We want very little: again, Jason Statham fighting massive prehistoric sharks, but even that is too much to ask of this tired retread.
We open 65 million years ago, when the world was ruled by various monstrous beasts who delighted in nothing more than chomping each other, a true “eat or be eaten” scenario. And while it’s absorbing enough to watch various CGI ghoulies (dinosaurs! titular megalodons! mini-“meg” dog things that can walk and swim!) gnaw on each other, we’re soon thrust into the present-day, a post-“Meg” world in which no one has really learned anything from the first film. (Note to anyone who missed the first film: just know that massive prehistoric sharks exist, and they are mad, you’re good to go now.)
A tremendous amount of plot has apparently unfolded in between the films, with returning screenwriters Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, and Dean Geogaris’ script quickly dispatching with a raft of information via clumsy exposition: Jonas’ (Jason Statham) original love interest Suyin (played by Li Bingbing in the first film) is dead, her brother Jiuming (new franchise star Wu Jing) is now a key part of the crew, the oceanic research facility Mana One has gotten into bed with some seriously big (bad?) business, and Jonas is now a fierce eco-warrior who spends his time infiltrating nefarious companies and exposing them (at least, when he’s not also trying to parent Suyin’s precocious daughter, returning star Sophia Cai as Meiying).
There is also — and this is one of the film’s stupidest and most amusing subplots — a young meg “pup” living in the Mana One facility, an orphan that Jiuming is convinced he’s trained into submission. Sure, Jiuming. When Jonas, Jiuming, and an assortment of Mana One crew members (some new, some returning, none of them clearly defined) head deep into the ocean for a seemingly routine visit, things start to go seriously awry.
First up: Meiying sneaks aboard one of the submersibles (always impressive, but hilariously so in the aftermath of the recent Titan submersible disaster; if nothing else, the world is now keenly aware how wildly improbable most of the technology that appears in the film is). Next up: Jiuming’s pup breaks loose, pushing the two submersibles deep into a 25,000-foot trench, which is filled with both a ton of megs and some sort of shady underground mining operation, run by the singularly-named Montez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) who is evil and also has a beef with Jonas.
The film slogs its way through an hour of “action” and “plot” and “water” in order to essentially a) rip a hole in the thermocline that separates the rest of the ocean from the depths of the trench (hilariously, we’re told it will patch itself up within an hour) and b) set up a nefarious villain to further stymie Jonas. Apologies here, but — hello? he’s got multiple megs, one giant-ass octopus, dozens of tiny meg-dogs, and his lingering fears over being a surrogate father to a plucky teen to contend with, this man already has enough on his plate!
All of that underwater action doesn’t just lead to clunky exposition and a serious lack of meg-centric terror, it also breeds a series of murky, unintelligible battles between the crew, Montez, other creatures, and the elements. You can’t see anything, which is actually just fine, because at least the first half of “Meg 2” could be significantly cut down (chomped?) in service to delivering the only plot point that actually matters: the ripped thermocline has released a handful of megs and other hungry creatures, and some of them might even be pregnant (cough, sequel).
Occasionally, pops of dark humor do surface. Much of it, however, feels incidental, perhaps even accidental: one particular element that kept this critic internally chuckling is that, after we’re told the ocean floor-set station would take millions and millions of dollars to run, the actual joint is a creaky joint that has clearly seen better days. Returning co-star Page Kennedy does his level best to turn a very thinly written supporting character into one with some style, down to the flashy MCM backpack he’s stuffed with survival items, as inspired by his experience in the first film (an actually smart choice in a film gasping for them).
Most damning, however, is the film’s genuinely nutso and entertaining final act, in which all of these various players (Statham, friends, Montez, megs, meg friends) converge on a tropical island somehow both colloquially and officially known as “Fun Island.” And while it’s a losing proposition to judge a film on what you wish it was, rather than what it actually puts on the screen, let’s risk it here: this should have been “Meg 2: Fun Island.”
Fun Island is just that, fun, but it’s also brightly lit, geographically coherent, often quite amusing (the denizens of Fun Island are precisely what you’d expect), and wall to wall with actually scary creatures. Megs in the ocean! Giant-ass octopus on the beach! Tiny meg-dogs howling across the isle! This is what the people want when they come see a film about Jason Statham fighting massive prehistoric sharks, and to act as if that’s somehow a revelation is to miss the ocean for the megs. May we suggest, “Meg 3: Funner Island”? The fun, it’s right there in the title. “The Trench”? Well, that sums up the dismal nature of this sequel well enough.
Grade: C-
Warner Bros. will release “The Meg 2: The Trench” in theaters on Friday, August 4.
