Twenty 20-Sharks is a chronological survey of shark attack movies. In this entry, we return to the world of The Meg.
If I’m being perfectly honest, I was kind of dreading the thought of watching a sequel to The Meg. That movie, as I mentioned in that review, was so interminably boring that it took me three whole weeks to finish. Was absolutely not looking forward to another bite at that mealy, worm-ridden apple. But then a funny thing happened: The sequel seemed to understand everything that was wrong with the original, and dared to be different. Not, y’know, much different. It’s still front-loaded with technobabble and submarine bullshit. But the back half is different enough in the ways that matter that I was actually able to finish it in one sitting. A win, as they say, is a win.
Meg 2: The Trench kicks off with our man Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) pivoting away from the underwater rescue business into a career as an eco-friendly James Bond-type. The action sequence that kicks off the film is very 007-esque, as Taylor stows away on a tanker which is illegally dumping toxic waste in the open ocean. He collects his evidence, beats up some dudes, and swan dives into the briny deep, fished out moments later by Mana One honcho Mac (Cliff Curtis).
Right away, this movie lets us know that we’re in for a different kind of ride, and hoo boy am I here for that. But just as soon as this opening salvo wraps up, we slam on the brakes and set the stage for the actual story ahead.
In the years since the end of the first Meg, Jonas married Suyin (played in that film by Li Bingbing) and became stepfather to Meiying (Sophie Cai). Suyin, unfortunately, died between films, so instead Meg 2 introduces her brother Jiuming (Jing Wu). Jiuming has taken over their father’s megacorporation, and is using its resources to run a facility for capturing and studying megalodons. He shows everyone that he’s taught their captive meg a trick, diving into the tank with it and using a sonar clicker to teach it commands. It’s heavily teased that Jiuming is crazy and doesn’t actually know how to train a megalodon. This is reinforced by the fact that his company is secretly funded by yet another evil billionaire, Hillary Driscoll (Sienna Guillory), who has designs on taking over everything. So great, Meg 2 has two potential Elon Musk types running around. That’s twice as many as the first!
The actual plot finds Taylor and his crew–with Meiying tagging along because she’s been upgraded from cute kid to annoying teen–exploring the trench they discovered in the first film1. Along the way, they discover a heretofore unknown deep sea mining colony, which we soon discover belongs to Driscoll. She tries to have Taylor and Co. killed before they can surface and tell anyone else about her secret underwater base. This results in most of the middle part of the movie taking place in a badly damaged deep sea vessel.
And just for fun, everyone’s wearing superpowered exosuits, because we gotta include something new, right? You’d think sticking a fourteen-year-old girl in a supersuit would be a license for the movie to get into some wacky shenanigans, but then that’d make you way smarter than the folks who wrote this movie.
Meanwhile, up on the surface, Mac and DJ (Page Kennedy) are stuck trying to defend Mana One from corporate espionage. Driscoll’s goons invade, all brandishing machine guns because these guys took the phrase ‘hostile takeover’ insanely literally. Mac and DJ go on the run, their only real job to survive until Taylor & Co. can find a way back to the surface to put Driscoll in her place. This is when DJ reaches into his backpack and produces a Desert Eagle, and tells Mac he has a bunch of poison-tipped bullets, “just like in Jaws 2!”
Meg 2 is wholly unashamed to wear its references on its sleeve. Director Ben Wheatley, no stranger to genre cinema, was apparently a huge fan of the first film, and actively lobbied to direct the sequel. And he definitely came prepared, because Meg 2 knows it’s second-rate cinema. At one point or another, this film finds the time to reference a bunch of different genre flicks including, but not limited to: Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Jaws, Jaws 2, The Poseidon Adventure, Jumanji, Die Hard, and the previously-mentioned 007-style opener. Point is, Meg 2 knows how big this sandbox is, and knows how to mix and match those elements to turn it all into something fun.
Because while the first and second acts are more of the same crap from the original Meg, the third act is where things finally go off the rails. The corporate espionage is (seemingly) thwarted and the day (apparently) saved, but with Driscoll dealt with, now we have the problem of a number of megalodons loose and heading for another crowded beach village. Yes, it’s just like the end of the first film, but this time everyone gets involved, and also we have weird megalodon hybrid lizards running around eating people. So now Taylor & Co. not only have to find a way to stop the rogue megalodons from eating everyone on the beach, they also have to get everyone to safety before they’re all eaten by rampaging lizards, or the giant octopus that just randomly appears. Taylor hops on a jetski with bomb-tipped harpoons to attach the megs; DJ and Mac go after the lizards with extreme prejudice; Meiying and her uncle struggle to survive the giant octopus attack, because sure why not?
For thirty glorious minutes, Meg 2: The Trench becomes exactly as silly as I’d been hoping these films could be. Why it took an hour through the second Meg movie to finally get there? I’ll never know. These are supposed to be huge summer popcorn movies. We don’t go to see realism or heady scientific mumbo jumbo. We go to see Jason Statham ride a jetski and throw a poison spear at a giant shark. And even then, in the pantheon of movie sequels where Jason Statham rides a jetski? It’s no Transporter 2.
FINAL RATING
3 stars (out of 5). S’better than the first!
NEXT TIME: Under Paris (2024)
- Hence the title. This confused me at first because they discovered the trench in the last film. But then that’s where most of this one takes place so… okay, fine.
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