The first Meg movie had some excitement to it. I saw it on a very rainy fall day and it’s the type of movie you throw on when it’s soaking wet rain and too cold to really get out. As Jonas Taylor, Jason Statham plays the stereotypical burnt out merchant for hire who suffers a trauma where he spends most of the time seeking in the bottom of a bottle, but it’s a PG-13 movie, so not so much.
The Meg spent over 20 years making it from Steve Alten’s book to the big screen. And now, The Meg 2: The Trench is also based on Alten’s 1999 book and spent just as long making it to the big screen. But at least it had Covid to halt things. And it seems like the three writers Dean Georgaris, Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber and director Ben Wheatley couldn’t make anything out of the book in all that time. It’s one of the most boring movies I’ve sdeen in a while. Even the Sharknado movies had more action with the same atrocious special effects.
Set five years after the events of the last movie, Jonas has sobered up and turning to fighting environmental crimes. And there is another megladon that Jiuming Zhang (Wu Jing) has been training. But it gets out. Ok, you’re thinking this is going to be the movie’s plot. But it’s not. No, there is some story about Mana One, the company from the first one, trying to mine the trench where the megladons came from for rate form of minerals.
So, it’s really just a story about those that survived the first movie fighting rich people underwater in some of the worst special effects I’ve seen. A lot of it is dark so you spend a lot of time wondering what’s happening. Also the PG-13 rating leaves a lot of things to be implied or to the imagination. While that sometimes is better if directed the right way, here it’s kinda lazy and dull.
What sucks is the movie doesn’t really get exciting until the third act in which they all find themselves at Fun Island where a bunch of prehistoric creatures including a huge octupus and some giant lizard creatures start attacking people along with the Megladons. It’s cheesy as a Jurassic World wannabe, but it still gives the movie some fun and excitement. There’s also a type of buddy-cop style relationship between Mac (Cliff Curtis) and DJ (Page Kennedy) as they deal with the saboteurs at the Mana One mining rig.
It’s just too bad the rest of the movie didn’t have the right mixture. Statham is so boring in his role he’s almost becoming the next Bruce Willis where you can see the tired look in his face as he delivers dialogue as if he’s been fed it off screen. Maybe it’s because he’s grown tired of acting in front of a green screen or having to talk to an inanimate object that will be replaced with CGI. Hopefully, he got a good paycheck for it. This movie cost about $130 million to make. Hopefully, everyone got a good paycheck out of it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 