‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Review: Jason Statham Carries a Heavy Load in Patchy Prehistoric Shark Sequel
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Given his grounding in visceral horror and thrillers laced with a mischievous vein of dark humor, Ben Wheatley seemed an intriguing choice to take the directing reins on Meg 2: The Trench, the sequel to the 2018 B-movie about a megalodon terrorizing a bunch of scientists and Jason Statham before homing in on a buffet of beachgoers.
The good news is that Statham’s back, bringing his rugged charm and tough-guy self-irony to sparkling dialogue like “I’ve got this,” “Shit!” and “See ya later, chum,” that last one delivered as he dispatches a prehistoric shark. The disappointing news is that the big, dumb fun promised by a terrific trailer — ingeniously cut to the 1977 Heart banger, “Barracuda” — only materializes intermittently in a movie that too often struggles to find the balance between suspense and monster-size silliness.
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To be fair to Wheatley, the Brit director is not helped much by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris’ pedestrian screenplay, adapted from Meg-series author Steve Alten’s novel, The Trench. Despite a tantalizing tagline — “New Meg. Old Chum.” — that hints at glorious heights of absurdity against a poster image of Statham framed by a giant set of gnarly chompers, the script only occasionally finds enjoyment in its preposterous plot. And while Statham gets solid backup from fellow cast holdovers Cliff Curtis and Page Kennedy, the rest of the ensemble is an unmemorable bunch.
That includes a corporate villain in palazzo pants (Sienna Guillory) who’s basically a knockoff of Marcia Gay Harden, ready to wreck the ecosystem for obscene profits; her dead-eyed young henchwoman (Skyler Samuels), sabotaging dangerous dives and giving orders to kill with all the authority of a junior publicist; and a tagalong kid (Sophia Cai) who was cute in The Meg but has now hit an age where her precociousness is more annoying than adorable.
Sadly, it also includes Chinese action superstar Wu Jing as oceanography institute director Jiuming Zhang, the girl’s uncle. He gets to pull off some nifty stunts, notably late in the film dangling from a helicopter or tangling with a giant octopus. But he doesn’t seem sufficiently comfortable acting in English to make the jokey camaraderie between his character and Statham’s Jonas Taylor work or to put the movie’s dual heroes on equal footing.
Meg 2 opens promisingly with a Cretaceous Period prologue already seen in the trailer, an amusing flow chart of food-chain supremacy in which a dragonfly is swallowed by a large amphibious lizard, which then gets chomped by a T-Rex that makes the mistake of lingering over its meal on the seashore, long enough to be devoured by a meg.
While you’re still pondering how a 65-foot ocean-dweller hauling so much tonnage could maneuver in such shallow water, we fast-forward to the present day, where Statham is doing what he does best — busting out of a cargo container and kicking butt on a ship manned by scuzzy pirates dumping radioactive waste into the Philippine Sea.
Back at the Oceanic Institute in Hainan, China, run by his pal Jiuming, Jonas is a gruff but doting father figure to teenage Meiying (Cai), whose oceanographer mother is dead, well, because Li Bingbing exited the production. The screenwriters scarcely bother to explain the circumstances, though they do have Meiying gazing through a fortified glass wall at a hulking megalodon and asking, “Do you miss your mom, big fish?”
The institute has the world’s only megalodon in captivity, named Haiqi and trained by Jiuming to respond to his come-and-go clicks. Jonas is skeptical: “The problem is it’s a meg, and you’re a snack.” Meiying stows away on board during an exploratory mission in diving pods, and when things go wrong, the protagonists get stuck on the ocean floor, 25,000 feet below sea level.
Sure enough, Haiqi has escaped in the meantime, attracting other megs in mating season (cue threequel). The divers discover a rogue mining operation led by Montes (Sergio Persis-Mencheta), a sweaty mercenary right out of Central Casting, plundering rare earth metal worth billions. He sets off an explosion that blows a breach in the thermocline, which has previously kept the megs in their lane at the bottom of the Pacific.
Jonas, Jiuming and their crew, with their submersibles compromised and oxygen supply limited, are forced to “walk” the ocean floor in Robocop-style suits, their numbers dwindling as they’re attacked by megs, those supersized salamanders from the prologue and various other menaces from the depths. We don’t mourn the losses because we’ve barely been introduced to the characters.
It’s when the action moves underwater for a long stretch that the film sinks, losing momentum and allowing too much time to consider the impenetrable techie dialogue, often delivered in impenetrable accents. Wheatley can’t seem to find a viable meeting point where deep-sea awe, murky perils and wise-cracking quippery can co-exist.
Things pick up when Jonas goes mano a mano with Montes, but even once they’re all back on the surface, with good guys fighting the shady characters using Oceanic Institute technology for their criminal scheme, Meg 2 takes time to recover.
The final section follows the template of The Meg on a larger scale, as the scene shifts to a tourist resort ominously called Fun Island, where our heroes have lots of close shaves with the megs, while some of the vacationers aren’t so lucky. You can sense Wheatley loosening up and having a better time here, trotting out the feisty fan-favorite Yorkie from the first film, Pippin, and unleashing the kind of seaside mayhem that’s been a staple of shark thrillers since Jaws.
There are winking nods to other films from the lineage, like when DJ (Kennedy), who has acquired serious survival skills since The Meg, reveals that he’s packing heat with poison-tipped bullets, “Just like Jaws 2.” Kennedy also gets to showcase his rap skills in an end-credits song that made me laugh with its chorus of “Chomp chomp on this / I’m an apex predator / Ain’t nothin’ regular / Nobody better than.”
Harry Gregson-Williams’ dynamic score pumps up the action, especially in the closing stretch as Jonas, Jiuming and their surviving comrades try to stop a meg feeding frenzy while saving themselves from the heavily armed mercenaries hired by the mining operation. Chris Lowe’s production design impresses with the Oceanic Institute and the very cool dive suits and sea vessels. But the megs themselves often don’t withstand closeups, looking like beat-up rubber shark toys, or Bruce on the Universal Studios tour.
As much as it’s a joy to watch Statham slinging explosive harpoons from a jet ski, Meg 2 offers only scattershot pleasures. It’s too ridiculous to muster serious scares and too tonally uncertain to convince us that it’s consistently in on the joke. Even as the mindless summer fun for which it’s intended, the overlong movie falls short. I was so disengaged at times that when people were yelling things like “Proximity alert — Megs!” I started fantasizing about a Meg Ryan or Meg Tilly cameo.
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