Meg 2: The Trench
Just when you thought that the Meg was the only bully in the canon, along comes a menagerie of boat-chomping beasties.
A kick in the teeth: The Meg vs. Jason Statham. Image courtesy Warner Bros.
Many a sequel falls into the trap of being merely a facsimile of the original. Not so Meg 2: The Trench. And more’s the pity. What begins as a routine nautical thriller soon starts to let in water and ends up splitting into several different genres. If anything, it’s actually a parody of the first and probably should have gone by the moniker of Monster Movie!! Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg was not to be taken seriously, but it had some entertainment value and its fair share of jump scares.
Here, a computer-generated prologue – set 65 million years ago – introduces us to a sordid food chain in which each prehistoric predator is devoured by a larger one. Then, just as we think these creatures can’t get any bigger, Meg emerges from the ocean and chomps down on a Tyrannosaurus rex. Really, the film should have stopped there. Sadly, though, we cut to the present day where Jason Statham emerges out of a shipping container atop a seafaring tanker and proceeds to take down an entire team of mercenaries defending the ship’s cargo of toxic waste. Yep, The Stath still looks good at 56. He then joins the crew of Mana One, an underwater research facility largely peopled by old friends, supermodels and a fourteen-year-old girl with a formidable vocabulary (she ponders on the intricacies of “cognitive dissonance”). Of course, diversity is the order of the day.
Inevitably, any maritime monster movie owes a debt to Jaws, which was about three guys and one shark. And that’s all Steven Spielberg needed to scare the heebie-jeebies out of us. Here, we have a whole team of skin-deep marine biologists and Jason Statham. There’s also a small army of gun-toting villains and more monsters than you can shake a harpoon at. It gets terribly congested. It’s always nice to see an old friend again, and The Stath has become like an old friend, dutifully delivering his quips with a straight face and swimming at deceptive right angles. Unfortunately, the one-liners are decidedly dumb (“the impossible just got possible”), the sort of dialogue you’d only find in a B-movie.
Consequently, such implausibility robs the possibility of any suspense or anything bordering on momentary distraction. What is really surprising about all this is that the director is none other than Ben Wheatley, who has more than an impressive cv. After all, this is the English filmmaker universally praised for such films as Kill List, A Field in England and In the Earth. Wheatley likes a bit of satire and is prone to display a very dark mentality, but The Trench is even less disturbing (if that’s possible) than its predecessor. The only real jaws here are the ones resting in the lap of the audience.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jason Statham, Wu Jing, Sophia Cai, Page Kennedy, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Skyler Samuels, Sienna Guillory, Cliff Curtis, Whoopie Van Raam, Melissanthi Mahut, Kiran Sonia Sawar, Felix Mayr.
Dir Ben Wheatley, Pro Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Belle Avery, Screenplay Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgari, Ph Haris Zambarloukos, Pro Des Chris Lowe, Ed Jonathan Amos, Music Harry Gregson-Williams, Costumes Lindsay Pugh, Sound Ben Barker, Dialect coach Helen Jane Simmons.
CMC Pictures/DF Pictures/Di Bonaventura Pictures/Apelles Entertainment-Warner Bros.
115 mins. USA/China. 2023. UK and US Rel: 4 August 2023. Cert. 12A.
