Jon Turtletaub’s The Meg was frustratingly dour and straight-faced for a film that pit Jason Statham’s rescue diver Jonas Taylor and a bunch of research scientists against a prehistoric megashark. And for its first hour, Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench is also a derivative and listless affair, feebly drawing influence from the likes of Alien, Jaws, and The Abyss but never coming close to approximating their mood of tension and horror.
Meg 2 finds Jonas now working as an eco-warrior alongside engineer buddies Mac (Cliff Curtis) and DJ (Page Kennedy) and a few other scientists. Again venturing into “the trench”—the deepest part of the ocean where megalodons, or megs, in the world of the film still flourish—Jonas and his team encounter an illegal mining operation and eventually find themselves trapped and forced to take extreme measures to escape. This underlit stretch of Wheatley’s film is filled with painfully cliché scenarios that desperately want for stylistic verve or even a basic sense of spatial geography to make them feel coherent, let alone compelling.
And then, unexpectedly, it all clicks into place, right around the point that Jonas is told that he can inhale water in order to survive the intense pressure of the deep sea and swim from his crew’s busted ship to an escape pod. This moment of patent absurdity abruptly changes the entire mood of the film for the duration of its runtime. Indeed, Meg 2’s second half is such a profound departure from its first, as well as the prior film, in everything from tone to pacing and color palette that it suggests a projection of a dying man’s wish fulfillment.
In the world of Meg 2, though, Jonas does survive his impossible ordeal. And as he and his team emerge from the ocean depths, with our hero seemingly transformed from a mortal sea diver into a Poseidon-esque action hero, it’s as if the film itself has become delirious from an extreme case of the bends. Which is a good thing, because Meg 2 is well served by dialing up the camp factor, finally owning the ridiculous, over-the-top nature of its premise.
This is a film that regales the audience with a scene in which Statham, in full-on Crank mode, stabs one meg with a broken helicopter wing and throws exploding spears at another while riding a jet ski on a giant wave. From there, the megs gleefully get their Jason Voorhees on, killing off giant squids and octopuses before then taking down one human villain after another. Even DJ, a scaredy-cat who couldn’t swim in the first film, gets a chance to play an action hero alongside Jonas, with a couple of sequences having a comic field day showing the fruits of his labor—that is, his martial arts training and the heat that he’s now packing.
By the time the film’s action shifts to the remote Fun Island—think the Galapagos Islands but as a high-end resort that offers various watersports—it’s clear that Meg 2 has fully turned its back on its self-serious roots and reality itself. It’s here, after all, that the fictitious dinosaurs we see in the brief cold open come into play and the audience is treated to a hilarious POV shot from the inside of a meg’s mouth as it chows down on several unsuspecting victims.
If the outrageousness of Meg 2’s second half diminishes the mostly hamfisted attempts at human drama, it’s only for the better. If your hook is the promise of seeing Statham go mano a mano with prehistoric sea behemoths, then leaning into the ludicrous is the only way to go.
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Our reviewer might want to revise his closing line to suggest that the thrill is seeing Jason Statham going mano a sharko. You know, just cuz sharks aren’t humans. Or, if you prefer the literal translation of hand to hand, they also don’t have hands.