I like nonsense. Anyone who knows me can tell you that, and many people who know me actually assume that I tend to choose to watch nonsense over anything else most days. That isn't true though. But I can be easily entertained by films that others don't want to waste their time on. Nonsense has to hit the right spot though, and that ties directly to the logic contained within a movie. If a film is full of magic or sci-fi elements that throw the rules of our world out the window then that's fine. If there are monsters on the prowl then that's fine. Unbelievable fights that look great and feature people who at least look as if they can handle themselves? Again . . . fine. Meg 2: The Trench is not the right kind of nonsense though. It's bad nonsense. The kind of nonsense that shows someone imploding when they have a problem with their suit deep underwater moments before it shows someone exiting a structure to swim elsewhere to open an airlock . . . at a depth of 25,000 feet. Yes, Meg 2: The Trench asks viewers to accept that a human being can swim around, however briefly, at a depth of 25,000 feet. I gave up at that point, saddened by a film that seemed destined to alternate between making me balk and making me bored.
While the first film was based around the appeal of watching Jason Statham versus a giant shark, Meg 2: The Trench moves away from the simplicity of that idea. There’s one trained shark in the mix (maybe, but maybe it’s not possible to train a shark), there are more megalodons, there are a few land creatures, and a huge octopus-like people-eater (shown via the huge tentacles that grab “snacks” and cause carnage). Statham is still present, of course, but he is wasted, alongside the rest of the human cast, for most of the runtime, stuck in a very dull plot about corporate treachery and sabotage.
Written by the same writers who delivered the first film - Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, and Erich Hoeber, all once again working from source material by Steve Alten - and directed by Ben Wheatley, it’s clear that the main aim here is to revel in silliness. Unfortunately, the silliness doesn’t work, and it doesn’t fill up as much of the runtime as it should. Seriously, who wants a Meg movie with so much time devoted to a sub-plot about scheming business folk?
Statham gets to do what he does well enough, but not often enough, and he remains a good fit for this material, delivering awful dialogue with ease and jumping around between sea monsters that we know he will need to defeat in battle. The other main stars worth mentioning are Cliff Curtis, Page Kennedy, and Wu Jing. The former two reprise their roles from the first film, with Kennedy being a lot of fun whenever he gets to show how he has learned to try and protect himself more from the danger of ginormous sharks, while Jing lends his name to a project that sorely mistreats him (fans of his work may be disappointed by how he is ultimately sidelined in favour of the Statham versus sharks plotting. There are some others in the cast, there to either be kept safe or turned into food for the big beasts, but I don’t want to spend time complaining about bad performances from people who aren’t given anything decent to work with.
The Meg was a disappointment, but it had enough fun moments to still make it worthwhile, just. This sequel is an awful mess, arguably something that the film-makers assume is saved by some of the special effects and ridiculous moments packed into the finale. I disagree with them. I stopped caring about anyone onscreen very early on, and I certainly couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm when it seemed as if the film finally remembered what it was supposed to be for the last 15-20 minutes. I hope Wheatley is satisfied now that he’s got this out of his system (although it has brought in some big bucks thanks to the way it pandered to the Chinese market for a box office win there), and I hope any future instalments in the series avoid boring me as much as this one did.
3/10
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