Meg 2: The Trench

Jonas Taylor is a man who lives a life of danger.

That’s right, he’s a secret agent man, but specifically only for the oceans, and when he’s not giving evil polluters some of the ol’ one-two, he’s exploring the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where he faces mankind’s oldest enemy… the Megalodon! A bigger-than-a-school-bus-sized dinosaur shark, once believed extinct, until the events of the previous film proved otherwise when a single Megalodon went on a rampage, forcing Jonas into a bit of a Donnybrook with the Cretaceous cretin. But that was then… Now, Jonas’ worst fears are realized as he finds himself facing THREE Megalodons!

I never saw the first Meg movie.

Partially because it’s based on a basically unreadable poor man’s Jurassic Park trash novel, and has had a decades long development process, passing through the hands of some really untalented people, including the idiot former head of one of the dumbest movie websites of the early 2000s (which is really saying something), so as a result… I never saw it, and I don’t want to either, mostly because it sounds dumb.

I wouldn’t have even bothered seeing Meg 2, honestly, except that Ben Wheatley is directing. Ben Wheatley! He made In The Earth, Kill List, Highrise, and A Field in England. Real movies! He also made Freefire too, but hey… they can’t all be winners. Still, what the fuck is Ben Wheatley doing directing Meg 2? Meg 2 is a Jason Statham movie! Jason Statham! He’s a human turtleneck and sports jacket combo, the guy probably drinks Zimas still. The only Statham movie of any value is Spy, everyone knows that, and that’s really more of a Melissa McCarthy movie. The One is pretty fun too, although that’s really more of a Jet Li movie.

But I digress…

My point is, I won’t begrudge an artist slumming it for a check, but still… how did this even happen? How did the parties even meet? Who called who?

So anyway, I watched Meg 2.

Seeing as the film was written by the same people responsible for the first Meg movie, as well as the Red movies, and the movie adaptation of the board game Battleship, not to mention the recent Transformers Beast Wars movie, let’s just say my expectations were very, very low.

The movie starts out with the oh so familiar “there always a bigger fish…” montage that is more fun than expected, a herald of things to come, as from there the film includes a disparate team of wisecracking goofballs who are all the best there is at what they do, a near-constant stream of pseudoscience technobabble, a quick glimpse of a dinosaur shark orgy, some underwater pirates, a rock crusher conveyor belt fight, a violent underwater decompression, a mechanized exo-suit vs piranha-dog battle, a few noble sacrifices and a sudden but inevitable betrayal, the releasing of a kraken, a giant shark feeding frenzy on a buffet of rich tourists vacationing in underdeveloped nations, and a bunch of evil capitalists as the bad guys, all of which is capped off with a literal jumping of the shark, and arguably the pinnacle of two titans tussling.

All and all, there’s a surprising amount of good choices here.

But… all of those good choices are hobbled by one single bad choice, which was making this movie PG-13. Who wants a shark movie, let alone a GIANT shark movie, when it basically doesn’t have gore? There are a couple of fun kills, sure, but they’re too few and far between to justify making this type of film. Although, to be honest, could anything justify spending almost 200 million dollars on a film where the entire premise is just… This time there’s MORE giant dinosaur sharks!

I realize it’s kind of a waste of time pointing out that this film is nothing but the silliest of silly nonsense with zero basis in reality, BUT… this film is so silly and so far removed from reality, that it robs you of any feeling of danger at all. At best, it’s only ever vaguely dangerous in theory, mostly because the audience understands that being this deep underwater is more dangerous in general than say… watching this film from your couch. Admittedly, my entire basis of deep sea diving knowledge mostly comes from osmosis from the Discovery Channel, and the behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the movie The Abyss (and also from the movie The Abyss), but it feels to me like every single part of this film is so blatantly impossible, such complete and total fiction, that it might as well be happening on the surface of the sun. Jonas fights a battleship-sized dinosaur shark at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, in a T-shirt and shorts, all while holding his breath… I mean, is the character actually in danger at that point? Am I supposed to feel tense, or scared?

Anyway…

The dialogue here is mostly the worst kind of expository shit, except for “See you later, chum,” which is maybe the best victorious hero pun ever written by a human being, nothing but the purest of bold creativity that nearly redeems the entire film. Also, unsuprisingly, it does look cool, at times. But in the end, Meg 2: The Trench is just too timid, too restrained, too rote, too… why bother. The film even had a chance to do the Deep Rising ending, but didn’t.

The cowardice… the pure cowardice.

The streak remains unbroken, the best trashy shark film is still The Shallows with Blake Lively.