‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Is Bigger, Sillier, and Better

By Richard Lawson

Five years ago, Jason Statham met a shark. Actually, multiple sharks, and very big ones. They were called megalodons, prehistoric creatures who had secretly been living in an undiscovered ecosystem beneath a deep-sea thermocline. The result of Statham’s rendezvous with these beasts was the subject of the 2018 film The Meg, an attempt at dumb late-summer fun that wasn’t dumb enough.

So Statham is returning to the light-starved waters (which, incidentally, have recently featured prominently in tragic world news) for a second attempt at charming us. Meg 2: The Trench (in theaters August 5) tries to tweak the formula while broadening its purview. Things work a bit better this time.

One problem with the first film, directed by Jon Turteltaub, was that it didn’t do enough exploring of the strange biome teeming at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. As the new film’s subtitle suggests, more time will be spent in that ominous expanse, sending Statham’s marine rescuer-cum-environmental activist Jonas Taylor into the depths for some kind of giant animal adventure. The film delivers on that promise, introducing us to a couple of new species and merrily flouting pretty much everything we know about oceanography.

In the years since the first megs were discovered, the character played by Li Bingbing has died somehow, leaving her daughter, Meiying (Sophia Cai), in the care of Jonas and Meiying’s uncle, Juming (Wu Jing). She’s a precocious 14-year-old eager to follow in her guardians’ footsteps. Thus she stows away on a routine mission past the thermocline, where, of course, things go wrong. Joining these three are your usual assemblage of random red shirts, while Cliff Curtis’s Mac and Page Kennedy’s DJ, returning to the franchise, watch from the surface.

What follows the submersible calamity is a mix of animal mayhem and human threat; Jonas discovers a greedy conspiracy that sets him against people he thought were colleagues, all culminating in a man vs. man vs. deep-sea creature melee at a resort called Fun Island. That madcap finale is reminiscent of the one in the first film, only with the volume (and the cleverness) turned up to a more delirious blare.

That’s credit in large part to Ben Wheatley, a British director best known (or best liked) as the director of gonzo crime movies like High Rise and Free Fire. Wheatley has, in recent years, swerved from the surrealist Sundance horror movie In the Earth to Netflix’s drab Rebecca adaptation, showcasing the director’s admirably discursive taste if not his acumen. He’s a better fit for the ludicrous climes of Meg 2, where he gets to mess around with physics and treat characters like weightless rag dolls blessedly liberated from any sense of real stakes.

He makes the movie fun, essentially, more deserving of its smirks and winks than the first film ever was. Meg 2 is confident in its schlock, piling on one ridiculous conceit after another at such a pace that the audience can’t help but be swept up in it. That is a harder needle to thread than many filmmakers seem to think—it’s not enough to just be stupid.

My screening audience perhaps hooted most loudly at a moment when a character explains, in pseudo-scientific terms, how an unprotected human could survive for a minute or two in the insane pressure of the sea floor. I’m fairly certain it’s all nonsense, but the movie brashly does it anyway, and then moves on to the next thing before we’ve really had a chance to call bullshit. There’s an odd gracefulness to that kind of moxie, whereas such things played sweatily in the first film.

Maybe that’s because the original Meg was still trying, a little bit, to be cool. How could it not with such a suave customer like Statham at the center? This can be a problem in these post-Fast and Furious times of ours, a confusion about the balance between action-star swagger and the goofy theatrics of the movie surrounding him. (And it is usually a him.) Ironic appreciation has become self-conscious in a way that often undermines the intent. Meg 2 straightens some of that out, more earnestly courting guffaws and hoots of appreciation without trying to strike any “but actually we’re pretty awesome” poses. Statham, in that regard, gives a refreshingly humble performance—he even lets himself fall off a jet ski.

This isn’t to say that Meg 2 is good. It’s a fleeting, forgettable time at the movies, which may qualify as enough for some moviegoers looking to soak in some high-blast air-conditioning and get queasy from popcorn butter grease. But those feeling more discerning, especially in the wake of Barbie and Oppenheimer’s bespoke blockbuster experiences, would probably do better to watch Meg 2 half-asleep on an airplane bound for Fun Island, dreaming of killer octopi.

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