By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Jason Statham, Wu Jing and Sophia Cai
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Written by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris
Warner Bros.
There are a number of issues with MEG 2: THE TRENCH, and just one of them is the fact that everyone treats the megalodons–those gigantic prehistoric forerunners of the great white shark, now extant in the movie’s present day–as just a fact of life. There’s little sense of awe or terror accompanying the monstrous killers, and in fact one has been captured and semi-domesticated, and given the name “Haiqi.” Hell, the film even attempts sympathy for the creature as teenage Maiying (Sophia Cai) gazes at it through observation glass and intones, “Do you miss your mom, big fish?” This isn’t quite the way to inspire audience fear of what’s supposed to be its centerpiece threat.
The original THE MEG was not exactly great, but it did elicit a decent share of tension and excitement as Jason Statham brought his dependable badassery to combating the super-sharks. He returns in MEG 2 (based pretty much in name only on Steve Alten’s THE TRENCH novel) as Jonas Taylor, though before we get to him, the film opens with a prehistoric prologue actually pulled from Alten’s first MEG book (but without the urinating hadrosaurs, thank goodness). Cut to the modern Philippine Sea, and Jonas indulging in some two-fisted espionage of the type we’re used to seeing Statham perform in movies like, say, EXPEND4BLES, which was trailered with MEG 2 at the screening I caught. That’s a bigger issue with this sequel: There’s an awful lot of generic action-thriller huggermugger going on in the script by returning writers Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris that relegates the megs to, for at least the first 70 minutes, barely seen supporting characters in their own movie.
Also back from the previous flick are Cliff Curtis as researcher Mac, Page Kennedy as engineer and designated comic relief DJ and Maiying, whose mom Suyin (played by Li Bingbing in the first MEG) has been conveniently written out here. Instead, Chinese action star Wu Jing plays Maiying’s uncle Jiuming, who runs an oceanographic institute–a role that barely gives Wu any chance to show his skills. All of these folks plus some expendable supporting players head down 25,000 feet into the Mariana Trench, where megs and other fearsome creatures dwell. Needless to say, an accident strands them all on the ocean floor, and survival depends on them making their way in mechanized diving suits to a salvage station three kilometers away. Those who saw 2020’s underappreciated UNDERWATER will recall how much suspense can be wrung out of this scenario, but here it’s all murk and hard-to-follow action, and the characters engaging in banal small talk when they should be conserving their oxygen.
It turns out there’s a duplicitous human element behind Jonas and co.’s predicament, including one conspirator whose backstory seems to have wandered in from FAST X by mistake, and a surprise villain who has only one or two scenes before their outing as a baddie, whereupon they explain their dastardly plot to the heroes in the most on-the-nose way possible. In general, the dialogue in MEG 2: THE TRENCH is as functional and expositional as it comes, with everyone constantly explaining what they’re doing or what they’re about to do (“We’re walking fast and with a lot of determination, but what exactly is the plan here?” goes a typical line) when not dropping lame wisecracks. The action setpieces are equally pedestrian; this 21st-century killer-shark movie actually contains a scene of two men fighting on a conveyor belt dragging them toward a rock crusher.
It’s also a killer-shark movie that, as noted above, skimps on the killer sharks. When, in the last act, the action finally switches to an oceanside resort where the megs can feast on the partiers, MEG 2 has some sporadic fun, though the excitement is diluted by the intercutting between a few different attacking species (weren’t the megs enough?) and several groups of good and bad guys fighting each other and the monsters. This lengthy sequence is a little more bloodthirsty than the very similar one that climaxed the first MEG, though you can still sense the filmmakers holding back for that PG-13 rating.
The biggest disappointment about MEG 2: THE TRENCH, though, is that it was directed by Ben Wheatley, the British filmmaker who has risen as one of the last two decades’ most distinctive and interesting genre talents. Sadly, there is almost nothing about this movie that suggests it was guided by the same hand that made KILL LIST, HIGH-RISE and IN THE EARTH. From start to finish, it feels like something cranked out of a Hollywood assembly line, and that nonetheless still doesn’t deliver the basic goods for its target audience.
