Review: 'Meg 2' lacks fun, humor of original movie

LOS ANGELEs, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- The Meg was a fun summer shark movie with a sense of humor about being a shark movie decades after Jaws. Meg 2: The Trench, in theaters Friday, is more like Jaws 2 if Jaws 2 understood even less what made Jaws a hit.

Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), Mac (Cliff Curtis) and DJ (Page Kennedy) are the only returning or surviving staff of the Mana One Marine Research Center. Li Bingbing's character, Suyin, died between movies in 2021 but her daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai) still tags along.

Suyin's brother Jiuming (Wu Jing) is now running megalodon shark research, even keeping one in captivity. Mana One is now funded by Hillary Driscoll's (Sienna Guillory) oceanographic institute as they try to penetrate the thermocline frozen layer of the ocean to explore the trench below it.

So far, so technobabbly good. The film proceeds to introduce this movie's shark food, aka the new crew of the Mana One. Those the film bothers to name include divers Lance (Felix Mayrs) and Rigas (Melissanthi Mahut), and Jess (Skyler Samuels) in the control room with Mac and DJ.

The Meg had a sense of humor about how absurd it was that a prehistoric shark got loose in modern times, as well as the tropes of monster movies like "the dog always lives." Meg 2 feels like it knows jokes exist but doesn't understand how humor works.

Screenwriters Dean Georgaris and Jon and Erich Hoeber return for Meg 2, but the new element is director Ben Wheatley taking over for Jon Turteltaub. The filmmakers may have intended to wink at the genre, but the results suggest maybe they didn't get it in the first place.

When megalodons get close to an island resort, the film introduces a random blowhard shouting into a phone and harassing women. It can be satisfying to see jerks get eaten in monster movies, but they have to exist in more than two scenes.

The lawyer in Jurassic Park or the evil jungle guide in Anaconda were established characters. A no-name guy getting his comeuppance one scene after he's introduced does not make the trope, let alone a good joke. One big shark joke is lifted from Warner Bros.' own Deep Blue Sea.

Action scenes now feel like a Sharknado movie without Sharknado's sense of absurd physics. Sharknado knows it's ridiculous but still abides by cause and effect when tornados hurl sharks at planes or any other outrageous sequence they concocted in six movies.

Meg 2 rushes through chaotic scenes hoping the viewer won't notice it's all random until they're distracted by the next random event.

Author Steve Alten wrote eight books in his Meg series and perhaps the filmmakers should have skipped over The Trench for a more cinematic tale. More than half of Meg 2's action takes place in that trench, which slows it down considerably.

The crew discovers there is already another marine lab under the thermocline layer. They get trapped in the trench by Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) to cover up his operation, mining precious metals for a nefarious company.

Jonas' crew have scuba exosuits that Jiuming developed so they can walk on the ocean floor, but they can't walk fast. Any satisfaction to be derived from fighting sharks in exosuits is mitigated by their lethargic speed.

At least Meg 2 looks more like they're actually underwater than The Little Mermaid did. The filmmakers added bubbles and debris floating by them, but it's also so dark at those depths one can't see much of anything.

They also spend a lot of time in the dark metallic hallways of the underwater station. There's a long stretch where there are no megalodons threatening the heroes at all. Some diversions can be fun, but the evil human scheming is not as cool as giant sharks.

The number of elements listed in the plot synopsis so far should indicate how convoluted Meg 2 becomes. The villains communicate with the crew in the trench on video monitors and monologue about how evil they are.

One villain is even holding a glass of wine while they reveal their evil scheme. On paper, that suggests it was meant to be campy. But like the other botched jokes, the film hasn't earned a campy tone.

Rigas explains some pseudo-science to justify Jonas free swimming with no suit at 25,000 feet below sea level. It has something to do with expelling his sinuses so the pressure won't kill him.

That sort of absurd logic could have worked in the first Meg, had it led to an awesome scene that was worthy of forgetting a little realism. For Meg 2, it's a long way to go to explain Statham swimming in dark water.

He's also ready to have a fist fight immediately after nearly drowning. Again, fine if it's a cool fight, but it hardly measures up to Statham's Transporter fights, or even his Fast and the Furious ones.

Statham and Curtis commit more than the material warrants, but it is their franchise. They can't write or direct it though.

The dialogue is so clunky, it's pure exposition and, if there's time, a desperate joke thrown in. However, when added as such an afterthought, those jokes don't sound like anything a human being would say in any situation, let alone a crisis.

The Meg proved there was an appetite for fun monster movies. Unfortunately, Meg 2 may make the studios believe people no longer want them, when really it's the film itself that lets the audience down.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.