Getting Chummy With Mediocrity
How The Meg 2: The Trench dives to new depths and ends up a bloody mess
In between stints as an environmental lawyer, my mom worked as a part time librarian. One of the perks of that at times stressful and bureaucratic job was her access to library discard books. These were titles that, due to lack of interest or deteriorating spines, needed to be pulled out of circulation. If they looked up my alley, she’d kindly pass these orphaned books on to me. This is how, in middle school, I first read The Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten.
While it would be too easy to use the fact that I only heard about this pulp shark thriller after the Berkeley Public Library literally discarded it as a metaphor for its inherent quality, the fact is this book was all I’d ever dreamed of as a shark-obsessed boy. Sure, I never got to the sequels like 2009’s Hell’s Aquarium, but the first book knew what it wanted to be and stuck the landing. It begins with a megalodon eating a T-Rex for Christ’s sake. If you can’t enjoy reading about that you’re either dead inside or over the age of 12.
Yes, in case you haven’t heard, I’m a lifelong shark fanboy and connosseuir of shark movies. When I found out they were adapting that megalodon book into a movie in 2018 I took a sick day to go see it. As I covered in my deep dive into my shark fandom, the first Meg film was basically a perfect “turn off your brain” movie, the type of mindless fun all adults need. When I heard that there was a sequel coming out this year, Alexis and I scheduled a date night to go see it.
At the risk of being “that guy,” the best scene in The Meg 2 is actually from the prologue to that first Meg book. In classic Hollywood fashion, it was also ruined by the trailer. I say ruined very loosely, however, because watching a 60 foot shark launch itself onto the beach to snack on a T Rex in no way affects the plot, unfortunately. I also use the term plot very loosely. This film doesn’t exactly have a narrative skeleton. Like a ginormous shark it features, it has some scary jaws attached to floppy cartilage, clinging on to a fin that’s worth a surprisingly large amount of money in China.
This isn’t to throw mega-shark-sized shade on China or the Chinese. I normally try to live by Michael Cane’s immortal words in Goldmember “there are only two things I can’t stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other peoples cultures…and the Dutch.” However, if you’ve seen the first Meg or this film you’ll know that they’re both funded by Chinese CMC Productions and clearly marketed towards the Chinese audience, necessary context for the hefty amount of Chinese stars, locations, and dialogue scaffolding these enormous shark adventures. This is also why, despite my personal sense of underwhelm, more Meg sequels are already inevitable since this movie is bringing in a megalodon sized amount of money from the Chinese box office.
My verdict on The Meg 2: The Trench is that it ultimately sinks into the uncanny trench between shark excellence and “so bad, it’s good.” Like its predecessor, it absolutely requires you to power down your brain, but unlike that mega monster romp, this film doesn’t reward you with nearly as much fun for doing so.
In retrospect, the first Meg benefitted enormously from the Snakes on a Plane effect. The plot summary and rationale for seeing it were all there in the title. If you wanted to see a very big shark, here was your chance. The sequel confronted me with the reality that isn’t a scalable formula for filmmaking. Seeing sharks the size of 747s was considerably less fun this time around. This started with the visuals. I suspect they blew most of their CGI budget on the opening meg eats T-Rex set piece, because the sharks in this film look terrible, halfway between rushed CGI and clay.
The plot does the audience as few favors as the CGI does for the sharks. Early on they just casually announce that they have a baby megalodon the size of a tourbus in captivity without ever explaining how or why they captured it. One megalodon on the loose appeared to be a huge crisis in the last film and now there’s one just roaming about like a recently fostered cattle dog? It gets more frustrating when they keep trying to imply it’s been trained with the kind of clicker you’d use to train a pet or a velociraptor in the Jurassic World franchise. The shark seems indifferent to the clicker, which Jason Statham’s character keeps trying to point out, at one point uttering the most insightful piece of dialogue in this entire film:
“The problem is, it’s a meg and you’re snack.”
This inane subplot goes nowhere, which is why I found this baby shark to be the most annoying one since that infernal ear worm of a song.
The trench in, The Meg 2: The Trench, is supposed to refer to the Marianas Trench, where all these pesky mega sharks keeping spawning from. However, it’s also an unintentional metaphor for the viewing experience. Your already low expectations must rapidly descend to soul-crushing depths to keep up with where this film seems intent on sinking.
Leading the journey once again in Jason Statham, an actor I once heard described as stubble personified. Like Dwayne Johnson, having starred in a few Fast and the Furious films, he is clearly now the type of male lead who will only read for parts where his character is invincible.
In this movie alone I saw him parkour off across the top of a container ship and then joust a megalodon with an explosive lance while riding a jet ski like a motocross bike. At one point he free swims across the bottom of a trench 25,000 feet deep. He does this casually, with no suit or oxygen, like it’s the bottom of a neighbor’s pool. The fact that the crushing forces at that depth would be like having skyscrapers piled on every square inch of your body didn’t seem to concern or even interest Statham or the filmmakers. He just scowls and then dives right in. Then, after this casual lil’ swim, he emerges from the water and promptly wins a knife fight with a shovel.
Is there anything Jason Statham can’t do? The only thing I could think of was speak fluent Mandarin. This is too bad, given that by my count at least 1/3 of the dialogue in this film is in Mandarin. The language barrier doesn’t seem to phase him anymore than the near constant machine gun fire, enormous sharks, lizards, and other sea creatures flying at him do. Instead, he has a perpetually grizzled expression on his face, like he’s about to say “Wuss all dis then?”
While I have a firm grasp of how Jason Statham works, this film has an extremely loose relationship with how the ocean, and by extension reality works. For example, recreational nitpickers may notice they show kelp growing on the bottom of the deep ocean, despite there being no light or oxygen down there, something the filmmakers could have learned with a casual Google search. Then there’s the fact that the submarines in this movie have the speed of a fighter jet, the maneuverability of a hummingbird, and the durability of a tank. Subs are to the Meg franchise as cars are to the Fast and Furious Franchise. While the vehicles exist in our real world, they have a much more bouncy and flexible set of laws of physics in movie world.
However, having just spent weeks of the news cycle analyzing the horrific crushing forces of the deep sea on submersibles in gratuitous amounts of claustrophobic detail, seeing this reality-free take on submarine exploration and adventure took me out of the movie. The pressure of the deep sea doesn’t add any suspense to the plot because it poses so little challenge to the characters and all their magical tech. Equipping Stratham with plot armor may have helped the screenwriters zip between action beats faster, but it comes at the expense of said action having any stakes or consequences.
After his sub gets stuck beneath small asteroid belt’s worth of boulders, Jason Statham tells the crew: “we’re going to walk” as if they’re discussing not driving to a nearby Starbucks, when in fact they’re considering venturing out of a trapped sub 25,000 feet below the ocean. They simply walk across the seafloor thanks to some impossibly pressure resistant mech suits, which they introduced by showing action hero Wu Jing using them to karate chop through a concrete blocks.
Some films asks you to suspend disbelief. I am usually more than willing to do this for shark movies. However, this film asks you to suspend yours with engineering fit to support the Golden Gate Bridge. Better yet, just chuck your skepticism into a lead-lined safe and drop it into the ocean. If you’re the kind of person that wondered if a lead-lined safe would float because of the air inside or sink because of the lead, you’re precisely the kind of person who cannot fully enjoy this movie. Welcome.
The middle act gets stuck in the titular trench, losing sight of the sharks you’re there to see, wrecking the pacing, and forcing you to squint at terribly lit action scenes on the ocean floor. It’s truly impossible to tell much less care about what’s going on. Did that guy get eaten by a shark, a lizard, or something else? Also, what was his name again? Too late, his fancy suit just imploded I guess. Bummer.
There’s an oddly prescient undersea mining subplot that is thrown out almost as quickly as it’s introduced, used instead as a the backdrop for Statham whaling on one of the movie’s interchangeable mercenary types with his fists and then a shovel.
When the movie finally comes up for air, the climactic show down takes place at a location called Fun Island, which is unfortunately anything but. This is not for lack of trying, though. The mega brawl stars 3 megalodons, several dinosaur adjacent lizard creatures, a giant octopus because reasons, and an endless parade of machine gun toting henchmen running about and shooting wildly. All the requisite beats occur. There’s a crumbling walkway that Statham must scurry across before it collapses, a helicopter, a speed boat, lots of automatic weapons fire, and a huge explosion. Not one but two corporate girl bosses gone bad get bloodless deaths in the jaws of different monsters. There’s an unhinged buddy cop dynamic starring Cliff Curtis (of Sunshine fame) that seems out of an entirely different movie. Partway through the melee, Alexis remarked to me: “Sharks just can’t enjoy eating boats this much.” Then Statham kicks a mercenary guy into a Megalodon’s mouth and says “See ya later, chum” with the gravitas of peak 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger. At this point I began to wonder if the brain I’d turned off to watch this movie written by over-caffeinated 8 year old boys would ever be able to turn back on again or if I’d have to toss it in a bag of rice to try and fix the water damage.
The protagonists had an easier time of it. By the end, they’re all drinking rum on the beach of a wrecked resort that was, minutes before, swarming with dinosaurs, krakens, enormous sharks, and mercenaries, looking no more ruffled than if they’d just finished a slightly sweaty game of volleyball.
It’s easy to blame the film makers for this crap, but I think I’m complicit in the madness at this point. When I heard that Tommy Wiseau of The Room infamy’s next film was going to be a shark movie titled (of course) BIG SHARK, my first reaction was the same as when I heard The Meg 2 announced:
“I’d see that, how bad could it be?”
Now I know. Having seen how ludicrous a big budget shark movie can be I’m a little scared to think about how bad a low budget one helmed by Tommy Wiseau would be.
Being a shark movie fan is like this though. It’s an unforgiving, masochistic lifestyle. At this point, like Jason Statham, I’m resigned to a life of chasing the thrill of scary encounters with enormous fish. Like him, my stoic scowl hides the fact that I know full well that I’m going to have to wade through a lot of bloody, derivative bullshit to land the white whale, er shark, I’m still chasing.
So who wants to see The Meg 3 with me? How bad could it be? This earnest question sounds more like a threat, which is a nice summation of where this franchise appears to be swimming.
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If you’ve got thoughts or questions about The Meg franchise, sharks, or Jason Statham’s stubbly stoicism, I’d love to hear them.