Movie Review: 'The Meg 2: The Trench'

The Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Directed by Ben Wheatley

Written by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, Dean Georgaris

Starring Jason Stathan, Cliff Curtis, Wu Jing, Page Kennedy, Sophia Cali

Release Date August 4th, 2023

Published August 4th, 2023

The Meg 2: The Trench is not great. Here we have yet another in a seeming series of mediocre, manufactured sequels/remakes intended to nakedly capitalize on a vaguely appreciated Intellectual Property. There isn't a single person working on The Meg 2: The Trench who appears to have enjoyed making this movie. No one appears to be having fun, each is merely going through the motions of an idiot plot, a series of dimwitted set pieces that stack the odds impossibly against our heroes only to have main character powers intervene to protect Jason Statham and the young girl who provides his motivation as a character.

The Meg of the title is a Megalodon, a theoretical construct of an ancient shark that lives in a trench heretofore unexplored and unmapped by human eyes. Or so we think. In reality, a heartless group of mercenary capitalists have managed not only to map and navigate The Trench, they managed to build an entire mining colony on the ocean floor, completely under the noses of our heroes. A spy in the operation of Jonas (Jason Statham) and his pal, Mac (Cliff Curtis), has helped steal proprietary equipment from their boss, Jiuming (Wu Jing).

Now that the team has traveled to The Trench for an exploration of the area, the spy sets about a game of sabotage, attempting to make sure that no one finds out about the illegal mining operation and the risk it provides to potentially allowing deadly Megalodons to escape from their undersea home and into the inhabited waters of nearby islands. Naturally, of course, The Meg's get loose and the mining operation was a mistake, and you know all of this before you ever get to this point in the movie.

The trailer has already told you that Jonas has a fight against Meg's in which he's trying to spear them. Thus, there is no tension or suspense, the movie has promised this fight and if it hasn't happened yet, then why should you worry that our characters might not survive the underwater fight sequence we suffer through for most of the second act of The Meg 2: The Trench. Not that the movie was ever going to place Jason Statham in a context where he might not survive, that's silly, he has main character powers. The only minor suspense in The Meg 2: The Trench is who, other than Statham and Jonas' step-daughter, have main character powers strong enough to never be in danger.

Spoiler alert, most of the characters you see in The Meg 2: The Trench, have main character powers. This means there is incredibly little tension or excitement in the movie. The danger feels forced and perfunctory. Each action set piece lacks in pacing and believability. It's all very silly but not silly in a fun way, silly in a fashion that leads to eye rolling. The makers of The Meg 2: The Trench needed to lean into the silliness and respect the fact that they are making a big dumb blockbuster. Sadly, there is a dour, dispirited quality to The Meg 2: The Trench that prevents camp, ironic appreciation of the film from setting in.

I did laugh during The Meg 2: The Trench but I don't get the sense that I was laughing at something intended to be funny. These weren't the kind of tension breaking cathartic laughs that a movie like this should inspire. Rather, this was derisive laughter, laughing at the movie rather than with the movie. It's not so much laughing at the ballsy absurdity of the film, something the Fast and the Furious franchise thrives on. No, this was more of a 'wow, this is really dumb' kind of laugh that accompanies an eye roll and a check of your phone to see how much longer the movie is.

The Meg 2: The Trench should be fun but instead, it's a slog through two hours of tension and suspense free nonsense. It's a movie that should not be taken seriously that is treated with a solemn seriousness that is deeply inappropriate for a movie this silly. Failing to embrace the absurd, like the Sharknado movies are good at doing, The Meg 2: The Trench aims to be a modern Jaws, a movie far more skillful and well rendered than anything anyone involved in The Meg 2: The Trench is capable of.

There is an elephant in the room when it comes to The Meg 2: The Trench and its a big one. The film uses submersibles for a sizable portion of the movie. The first time you see the tiny subs you can't help but think of what happened earlier this year when a group of very rich men got inside of a small sub to travel to the Titanic and died a horrific underwater death. It's reasonable to assume the makers of The Meg 2: The Trench would rather not be associated with the sub disaster and thus the marketing campaign behind the movie focuses on anything other than being underwater in a sub. I can confirm that when I saw the undersea footage, I could not stop thinking about the Titan Submersible and various darkly comic memes and jokes that emerged from that grisly situation.

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