Meg 2: The Trench

I have never been less interested in a film about a big shark killing people. I went into Meg 2: The Trench hoping that it would be a fun time, but it was anything but that. This film is barely two hours long yet feels considerably longer. The film does open promisingly with a moderately amusing scene where a Meg takes a big bite out of a T-Rex. Alas, everything after that is nonsense in the worst kind of way. I am someone who is always down for some silly schlock shenanigans, but in this film everything comes off as dull and uninspired.

Jason Statham reprises his role from the original film and sleepwalks through it. The rest of the cast has very little to do and makes no impression. Despite these performers not making much of an impact, the film expects the audience for us to care about these characters. Much of the film consists of scenes of characters talking in rooms about Megs and scenes in oil rigs on subpar James Bond escapades, and yeah, it’s as every bit as tedious as it sounds. No one in the audience cares about the evil company the protagonists are being forced to be up against. They are here to see a big shark kill people, which takes up maybe only a fifth of the film’s actual running time. It is insane that the film has chosen to prioritize the most overdone action film tropes imaginable over prehistoric creatures going on a rampage. The film may want to be campy, but it is never actually fun.

This is more of an action film than anything else, which would be perfectly fine had it not been shot in such an uninteresting way. Many of these sequences are hard to follow, as the set-pieces involving the megalodons and other prehistoric creatures often had shoddy CGI and unmotivated camera movement. There are also very few scenes of megalodons chomping on humans.  When they do eventually arise, they are all fairly bloodless and not creative in the slightest. The film is greatly held back by its PG-13 rating. Most of the fun from these silly shark movies are from over the top kills, but because of the film’s rating, almost all of the deaths are of characters being chomped whole by the megalodon. Despite the film having Meg in the title, the film does not put that much of an emphasis on the prehistoric beasts.

Much of the bland and uninteresting nature of this film stems from its direction. Ben Wheatley is a director I have a lot of respect for. He has made some really great films, and has had a good variety in his filmography from folk horror with A Field in England and Kill List  to satire with Free Fire and High Rise. Usually, his films feel textured and in a world of their own. His style is adaptable among genres, but it is not once seen during his latest outing. I hope that he can use the money he made off of this to make a really cool personal project. This is absolutely a project he made with a “one for them” mentality, and I hope his next film will be a strong personal work with all the directorial flair this film lacked.

There are a lot of shark films out there with a variety of budgets. Some have been made with the slimmest budgets imaginable (complete with delightfully bad visual effects) while others were made with obscene budgets. Meg 2: The Trench was made for 185 million dollars. Despite its massive price tag, the film plays closer to a film found on Tubi than a fun summer blockbuster (save for the fact that most films from Tubi are infinitely more entertaining than this). If you are a bit fazed by this review but still have a shark film frenzy to quench, I’d recommend watching Sharksploitation, a Shudder documentary about the history of shark movies. Don’t waste your time with this leftover shark chum. 

2/10