‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Movie Review: This Movie Bites
Photo from IMDb
From Joe Peltzer
It’s pretty hard to make a movie about a giant shark be about as enjoyable as a colonoscopy, but somehow Ben Wheatley has managed to do just that with Meg 2: The Trench, a sequel that makes SyFy Channel original films look award-worthy.
In the follow-up to the $500 million grossing The Meg, Jason Statham returns as Jonas and finds himself thrust into dire underwater straits while exploring the mysterious trench, discovering bad actors down there that may have roots closer to home. If you’re wondering why that synopsis didn’t mention any of the megalodons, that would be because they are a complete afterthought. They take a backseat to sprinkled morsels of what could have been an interesting plot had it not been buried under poor performances stemming from a brutally terrible script. Statham, who spends about 15 minutes on a jet ski in the third act, is the only palatable character (which is saying something) while the rest are undercooked, cursed with the most generic dialogue you can imagine and with the empathic draw of poison ivy.
It is truly wild that Meg 2 strayed so far from the DNA that made 2018’s The Meg a good time, the first film’s writers largely responsible for this scripted mess. The scope of this film is very small, even as the megalodons are now a threesome and a giant squid makes a random appearance along with Jurassic World-wannabe creatures. The villains are cookie cutter and uninteresting, though one unintentionally looks and acts like he should be running a drug cartel. This feels like the cinematic equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall; I can’t imagine that the novel on which this film is based is this much of a mess.
Meg 2: The Trench will have you laughing, but it’s likely because of the cringeworthy dialogue and the subpar CGI. What the film does accomplish is that it reaffirms that any shark-based movies never spawn adequate sequels, a lesson that studios should learn before they subject themselves to embarrassment like this.
Meg 2: The Trench is now playing in theaters.
Rating: 1/5
