Hollywood loves dumb ol’ shark movies, don’t they? They saw the first Jaws and thought “What about this movie is resonating with audiences? Is it the expert directing, the tense pacing, the terrific performances? Nah, I think it’s the shark, and only the shark.’ So they made like 5 sequels, a bunch of coattail riding one-offs, and eventually irony riddled parodies. I get it, sharks are awesome. I was obsessed with them as a kid. But I’m an adult now, and it’s gonna take some creativity to make me give a damn about your shark movie. And no, making it bigger isn’t the answer. 

2018’s The Meg was not the first attempt at bringing the ancient predator to the big screen. No, it followed in the footsteps of trailblazers like Megalodon, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Megalodon Rising, and everyone’s favorite, Bigfoot vs. Megalodon. I hear Criterion is adding that to their collection next month. In a post Sharknado world, The Meg had no choice but to be somewhat self aware of its horror/action plot, but that still doesn’t mean the final product came out all that fun or memorable. But hey, it made more than double its budget for some reason, so there’s obviously a market for Jason Statham fighting huge creatures somewhere, possible Chinese money laundering theories aside. But instead of building upon the concept, the characters, the stakes or the scope, the sequel more or less feels like a retread that doesn’t seem to have any clue of what it wants to be.

The Meg 2: The Trench is a cliched, derivative hodge podge of ideas that don’t exactly work narratively or tonally. It’s not scary enough to be an effective horror movie, it’s not filled with memorable action scenes, and it’s certainly not funny enough to have a dumb fun enough time to forget the movie’s shortcomings.

The Meg 2 returns to the deepest, darkest areas of the ocean, where expert diver Jonas Taylor and crew will have to face not one, not two, but three Megalodons, other dangerous undersea creatures, and the biggest monster of all; corporate greed. 

I think one of the most glaring issues I have with this film is its tone, or lack thereof. The film acts like it knows what it wants to be, but the halves of the story almost feel like completely different films. The first portion of this film plays out like an underwater survival film, with our crew surviving a submarine crash and trying to traverse the bottom of the ocean while being picked off by the horrors of the deep. It’s definitely the most interesting piece of the story, even if it’s not very shark themed. This section is played pretty seriously, with crew members whose names you won’t remember die off one by one. Even if it’s rather cliche and not always well executed, the stakes at least feel real and you can tell some effort was put into the narrative. But once we leave this backdrop and breach our way back to the surface, the film goes from survivalist thriller to Sci-Fy channel original movie. The quips and the silliness suddenly spike as many baddies and nameless nobodies get devoured by the titular beast and a few other prehistoric pals. This almost feels like where the film should have been all along, but even then it’s not all that fun. The action gets incredibly over the top to the point where it’s hard to take seriously, which I get you’re not supposed to do for a B-movie, but the film had just spent so much time being grim and serious that the more outlandish aspects of the film just feel like whiplash. It’s not even all that funny, as a lot of the jokes and shark based slapstick just feel so tired and unimaginative. Any tension we had for these characters seems to immediately disappear as it becomes very apparent the stakes have mellowed out now. It’s ironic because a film with this kind of premise would probably benefit from going as big and stupid as it can, but the serious, somewhat grounded stuff from the first portion was genuinely the more intriguing aspect.

The characters are par for the course action movie archetypes. You’ve got badass man, badass woman, mature child looking to prove themselves, man in the chair, and actor who probably improvised all of his lines. You’ve seen one Jason Statham performance, you’ve most likely seen them all. His character Jonas Taylor is given a bit of a hook with his duty to protect his step-daughter, but it doesn’t lead to anything worthwhile in the character or plot department. The performances feel more like line reads rather than…well, performances. Everyone seems preoccupied with looking cool rather than realistically selling their situations through any emotion outside of a furrowed brow. It’s not on the Fast and Furious or Expendables level of vanity, but it’s still dull enough to mention.

But as we always say, who gives a damn about characters or plot when we’ve come to see people get gobbled by gigantic sharks. I’ll concede to that, but you have to make these kills actually good. The PG-13 rating really chops the balls off of this film’s brutality, leading to bloodless deaths that either involve just being swallowed whole or being killed off screen. The megs feel so far removed from the plot for a good chunk of this film, and when they do finally get to terrorize the people of the land, it’s just so underwhelming. The film tries to shake it up by adding new deep sea creatures to the mix, like a giant squid or big iguana-like dinos that attack in swarms. Yet they fall prey to the same unoriginality that plagues the headlining beasts, only now they’re taking attention away from the thing we all came here to see. The film fails to generate even a tiny bit of suspense or horror with its creatures, due in part to scares you can see coming from a mile away, topped off with cheap jump scares that basically amount to poorly edited jump cuts with a loud noise.  The creatures don’t even look all that good half the time, and the film seems to know this. They’re covered in a shroud of darkness for a good chunk of the film, which helps hide the imperfections for a while, but as soon as they’re in broad daylight, they tend to look a little worse for wear. And it’s not just the creatures either, as the locations are often incredibly unconvincing sound stages that really keeps a lot of scenes from feeling grounded in any semblance of reality. The resort the final act takes place at hardly feels like anything other than a single dock, so the film doesn’t exactly have the scope that should come with a sequel.

But you want to know what my biggest, glaring issue with this movie is? It’s not dumb enough. Honest to God. It’s dumb, but not in a way that’s fun to watch. It’s dumb in the sense that it knows it’s dumb but puts in such a lack of effort because it knows no one watching it is taking it seriously. You can have Jason Staham throwing explosive harpoons from the back of a jet ski. Really. I encourage it. But why aren’t you doing shit like this throughout the whole movie? Why are you trying to be serious and scary when your audience just wants loud, dumb action. No amount of irony or winking at the camera can ignore the fact that you’re committing one of the most cardinal sins of schlocky, monster action movies.

You’re boring!

Almost everything about this film is cliched because the filmmakers think that just being cliche is funny enough. A better film would have used these cliches to lampoon the genre or subvert expectations ever so slightly, but this film is just content with being a bare minimum watch that’s stupid, but a different kind of stupid than the film thinks it is.

Honestly, I don’t even hate this movie. I know I just dunked on this film for 10 minutes, but at the end of the day it’s just harmless. I actually don’t mind it over films like Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania or Scream 6, because I actually had some kind of expectation for those films to be good. With the Meg 2, I had no expectations and was left feeling neither surprised or hateful. It may scratch the smallest of itches for lovers of sharks or bald Englishmen, but for me, it made me feel nothing. Really, go watch something else this weekend. Go see The Last Voyage of the Demeter, go see TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, go see Talk to Me, go see the re-release of Oldboy in certain AMC theaters, hell, go see Barbie or Oppenheimer again. Me, I’m gonna fight the urge to drink this fish bowl all by myself.

Rating

Megaladon Bite

I’ve already covered two different iterations of the Shark Bite cocktail in my reviews of Jaws, so it only made sense to take a classic and make it bigger and dumber, just like The Meg! This is quite a powerful fishbowl that implores 3 different types of rum, lemon lime soda and candy. You’re gonna need a fish bowl for this, and your measurements might differ depending on how big of a bowl you get your hands on, particularly with the soda. And in case you can’t already tell, this is a drink for groups. This is supposed to serve multiple people, I’d say maybe about 5. Don’t go making this for just yourself. Drink one of these yourself and you might start thinking The Meg is a good movie.

Ingredients

• 8oz spiced rum
• 6oz coconut rum
• 4oz pineapple rum
• 2oz blue curacao
• Nerds
• Swedish Fish/Gummy sharks
• Top: Sprite (or other lemon lime soda)
• Top: Grenadine

Instructions

1. In a medium-sized fish bowl, add a layer of nerds to the bottom.
2. Add your alcoholic ingredients.
3. Fill fishbowl with ice.
4. Add Sprite until bowl is almost full.
5. Pour a little bit of grenadine over the top.
6. Garnish with gummy fish/sharks.