Review: The Meg 2 - The Trench

The Meg 2: The Trench
Cert: 12A / 111 mins / Dir. Ben Wheatley / Trailer

It may seem naïve to hope a prehistoric shark action-er might do something unexpected, so fair play to director Ben Wheatley and his team of three screenwriters*¹ ~ about half of The Meg 2: The Trench isn’t actually about the megalodon, and about half of it isn’t set anywhere near the trench. This is impressive, in its own way. Although it's the only thing that is.

The film is somehow not quite as excruciating as expected, but it is every bit as lazy, patronising and formulaic. Murky visuals and monosyllabic scripting bloat out a plot structure that resembles a trope-showreel assembled by AI. This is basically Jurassic Park, then it’s Jaws, The Abyss, Pacific Rim, a bit Predator, Piranha 3DD, back to Jurassic Park and then Godzilla vs. Kong*², threaded together by Jason Statham playing his Jason Statham Character™ while no one else is introduced properly because most of them will cark it 20 minutes after their first appearance anyway. The Meg 2 promises little and delivers less. You have never seen $129 million feel so cheap. Still, it's something to tide The Dads over until Expendfourbles comes out.

I haven’t seen a movie this dumb since Plane.
And do remember, I sat through Fast X...

*¹ I'll put my hands up and admit that it was only in assembling this review that I learned the movie is based on a novel. As in, an actual work of printed literature that you could probably find in a proper library near real books. And it's based on a novel because the previous movie was based on the previous novel. There's a commercial appetite for this shit but without the pictures? By extension, this means there's going to be at least one more of these. At least. God help us all... ^{[ BACK ]}

*² You see, I'm very aware I've accused this movie of lifting wholesale from at least seven others, some of which were produced after the 1999 novel upon which it's based. But given the historical nature of the disaster movie format and the additional number of inferior rip-offs which already exist, plus the fact that The Meg 2 was still made by a perfectly competent director in this form in 2023 with all of that shit pre-existing, the point still stands. Ben Wheatley, though. Actual Ben Actual Wheatley. Fucking hell. ^{[ BACK ]}

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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