The Meg 2: the Trench

Image credit: newreleasedates.com

Sometimes you watch a film and you have to stop and ask yourself, ‘why did they bother making this?’ Partner and I really enjoyed The Meg when it came out. It was another dumb shark movie that didn’t take itself too seriously because it was another dumb shark movie. And this type of meaningless enjoyment of a dumb movie prompted a group of people with money to say, ‘hey this did kind of ok, let’s make another one.’ Yep, you guessed it, over the long weekend here in Aus, partner and I cosied up in bed, despite the unseasonable Springtime heat of a 30+ degree day and watched Meg 2: The Trench.

The film follows environmental warrior Jonas Taylor (Jason Stathan) and a team of researchers that have come up with the technology to travel to the uncharted depths of the ocean. Upon their maiden voyage, all hell breaks looks when they discover a malevolent mining facility that is being run by one of their own partners. As the team tries desperately to get back to the surface, an explosion tears a whole in the protective barrier of the crushing depths and a few megs as well as a kraken break free to terrorise the nearest source of food: an island resort.

There was absolutely zero point to this movie. I don’t have anything good to say about it. The story itself, if you can even call it that, doesn’t even focus on the monsters as the villains or source of drama. These three ludicrously ginormous sharks and a kraken, a bloody kraken, are a mere side effect of the real villain’s plan, which is to make a load of money. I would not be surprised that everyone working on the film read through the script once and immediately regretted agreeing to work on it.

Oh, and did I mention there are dinosaurs now? Yeah, evolution is thrown out the window and these little dinosaurs that feature at the film’s beginning, set 65 million years ago, pop up again in a new environment completely unchanged. This has to be one of the laziest and disinterested scripts in the history of cinema. Clearly the deadline was creeping forward and the writers had a week to start and finish the whole thing. “Jurassic World is doing ok, we need dinosaurs.” “Ooh, what was that giant octopus monster in Pirates 2? Yeah let’s put one of those in.” “Capitalism’s the real enemy right, that’s why we’re ruining the planet.”

Image credit: oltnews. com

I’ll tip my imaginary hat to the actors for trying to inject some feeling into this steaming heap of garbage. The performances are all fine, in fact I would say they are the only thing that kept partner and myself watching seeing as there’s no clever camera techniques or special effects wizardry, or artistic design that didn’t make us yawn or groan. But I will admit that we didn’t immediately guess who the saboteur was. So there was either some semi-clever misdirection or they literally came up with a villain a scene before they’re meant to show up.

Stick with the dumb fun of the first movie. Do not bother with The Meg 2: The Trench.

Director: Ben Wheatley, 2023

Cast: Jason Statham, Jing Wu, Shuya Sophia Cai, Cliff Curtis, Page Kennedy, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Skyler Samuels, Melissanthi Mahut, Whoopie Van Raam, Kiran Sonia Sawar, Felix Mayer & Sienna Guillory.