Meg 2: The Trench

My partner isn’t a big movie watcher overall, but if there’s one thing she loves, it’s shark movies. Which means she tolerates a wide range in quality, from Jaws to Deep Blue Sea to Ghost Shark. So of course, she’s a huge fan of The Meg, and has been eagerly awaiting Meg 2 ever since its announcement. In part, because it meant more Statham fighting huge sharks with his “hamster ball”. And in part because she’d finally subject me to The Meg. It was not good.

But I still wanted to see the sequel. Partially because I like spending time with her, and there’s not much overlap in our movie taste, so this was a good opportunity. And partially because I was hopeful. Surely they’d take reactions to the first one into account and make a movie that was more over the top, and thus potentially more fun, right?

Right?

Meg 2: The Trench (they dropped “The”, for some reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) finds the surviving characters fighting environmental crime, raiding cargo ships which are dumping toxic chemicals into the ocean. They’re also working with Mana One to continue exploring the trench and thermocline after finding a new financier in Hillary Driscoll (Sienna Guillory). On a routine exploration mission into the trench, they stumble across an illegal (and dangerous) mining operation. Before they know it, the leader of that operation Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) has taken defensive measures, leading the crews of the sub to fend for themselves with severely damaged equipment, thousands of feet under the sea. And in addition to having found the trench home to more megalodons, they discover that’s not the only monstrous secret housed in the depths…

The plot is spiced up a bit by adding sabotage to the mix, with signs that the rescue sub is out of commission due to the actions of someone on board. Granted, the movie makes no attempt to hide who the saboteur is, so I’m not entirely sure why we bothered with that subplot. The main tension comes from the action on the ocean floor, especially once the megs show up. The Meg, demonstrated a tremendous willingness to kill off established, core characters, and that’s no different here. The whole walk across the sea floor to “safety” we’re on edge, wondering who might die. No one is safe (well, except Statham).

That forms the middle of the film, which is by far the best part. It’s not great, as it’s overall quite predictable, and almost every beat is telegraphed. But they do an alright job drawing it out, moving between the anxiety on the sea floor and the chaos on the surface. There are even a few good moments, including an homage to Deep Blue Sea.

But that’s about all the good I can muster for this film. It’s boring, intensely unoriginal and unengaging, and gives us characters so one-dimensional that even all the time spent with them (and it’s a lot) amounts to no complexity or nuance. The effects are generally mediocre. Despite being a shark movie, the sharks are largely incidental, and not because of the other monsters, which are even more irrelevant. It’s all just a total mess.

Even the big, extended set piece to end the movie is just dumb. You might get some enjoyment from it in that monster movie way, but there’s minimal creativity, and what little they play with is executed so blandly that it fails to stand out.

Meg 2 is trying to do a bit more with its themes, they just fail to land. The most straightforward one involves family and the relationship between Jonas (Jason Statham) and his step-daughter Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai), especially since Meiying’s mother Suyin (portrayed by Li Bingbing in The Meg) has passed away off-screen. She’s trying to assert her independence, and he’s trying to be a father. And over the movie, we see them come to an understanding. Nothing radical, no notable events which bring them more together, it just kind of…happens.

There’s also an environmentalist theme. While any movie about a sea monster has some element of that inherent to the premise (the ocean is literally telling us to piss off), Meg 2 makes it more explicit. Not only are we reintroduced to Jonas taking down some polluters, but his conviction throughout is that trying to keep a meg in captivity is absurd. Oh, did I not mention they captured one and raised it in a humongous ocean based tank? Forgive me, it barely matters. In any case, Jonas favors studying them in their habitat. And the megs only escape the trench to cause havoc when humans get into their own fight, blowing a hole in the thermocline. Which leads to a ton of deaths of people who are spitting in the face of the natural world.

But as I noted, even when these ideas are present, you don’t feel them. They’re not played well, and the performances are fine at best. No one’s quite sleepwalking through, but no one’s doing their best work, either.

The screenplay is one of the most fascinating aspects of this. It is absurdly derivative. Entire quotes, both verbal and visual, are lifted from other movies. Characters largely speak in quips stripped of their original context. Many of them are from other shark movies (the bad guys stop just shy of bemoaning the size of their boat), but also generic Hollywood action movies. It’s so often, so blatant, so glaringly obvious that I’m forced to believe it’s deliberate, that they wanted you to notice because they were trying to make a point. But if I’m being honest, I wasn’t able to figure it out, so it just felt incredibly weird and off-putting instead.

They also quote themselves quite extensively: so, so many of the beats are just retreads of The Meg, which featured the same writing team. That’s fine in general, if a little boring. I’m always going to prefer a sequel tells a fresh story with the world and characters we know, but a retread isn’t automatically bad. However, you run the risk of the new context making the same old story harder to accept after the events of the earlier film. And in this case, that earlier film didn’t do a good job with it, either, handicapping the whole attempt.

Most of those crappy, absurd shark movies are basically no-budget affairs. They take insane premises, play it out with no name actors, and bring it to life with the best CGI 1989 had to offer. They end up awful, but at least they’re taking a swing, so they have a chance at being fun. They have no illusions about what kind of movie they are. Which is part of why Meg 2 sticks in my craw so much. There’s very little creativity here, very little that’s truly over the top. Yeah, the sharks are huge. But that’s where the idea stops. Meg 2 wants to be a good shark movie, and yet it comes across as trying to do so with as little effort as they can, despite the large budget. It’s too boring and grounded to be fun, they dwell too much on the characters without it really mattering, and no one effectively sells it. Just like The Meg, Meg 2 ended up boring.