A One Mann’s Movies review of “Meg 2: The Trench” (2023).
Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t mind a ‘park your brain at the door’ action thriller. (I really don’t.) Reading again my review of “The Meg” from 2018 (3*’s) I actually wrote the words “I quite enjoyed it”. Now Jason Statham is back as Jonas Taylor in “Meg 2: The Trench”. But this one is less ‘park your brain at the door’ and more ‘stick your brain, liver, heart and all your internal organs in a blender and turn it on’. For it is utterly bonkers, disjointed, nonsensical and lacklustre.
Bob the Movie Man Rating:
Plot Summary:
Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is running around the world like some Greenpeace James Bond, sorting out ecological bad-men. Now working with a millionaire owner of an oceanographic centre (Wu Jing) and his young daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai), Jonas is involved in an exploratory dive into The Trench where they discover something on the sea-bed they were not expecting.
Certification:
UK: 12; US: PG-13. (From the BBFC web site: “Moderate threat, violence, bloody images, rude gestures”.)
Talent:
Starring: Jason Statham, Wu Jing, Sophia Cai, Cliff Curtis, Page Kennedy, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Skyler Samuels, Melissanthi Mahut, Kiran Sonia Sawar, Felix Mayr, Sienna Guillory.
Directed by: Ben Wheatley.
Written by: Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber & Dean Georgaris.
Twitter Handle: #MegMovie.
The “Jurassic Park” opening would have been a nice surprise…. if the trailer hadn’t given it away!. (Source: Warner Brothers).
“Meg 2: The Trench” Review:
Positives:
- The final 20 minutes have some of the ludicrous energy of trash-films like the “Piranha” series. A “Meg’s eye-view” of tourists becoming lunch is cheesily innovative.
- Wu Jing (the “highest-grossing male actor of all time in China”) is twinkly and pleasant in the role of Jiuming Zhang. (Was I the only one in my head singing “I’m Jiuming… I want to Jiuming with you”?).
- It was good to see the return of the character Meiying, the little girl in the original “Meg” film. She had, for me, the most memorable visual scene in that first movie. It’s great that she was played by the same actress, Sophia Cai, now 5 years older!
- An “implosion” scene is nicely done.
- Loved the Chinese version of “That’s Not My Name” over the end credits!
Negatives:
- I really wrestled with writing the “Plot Summary” for this film, since I genuinely struggled to remember who all the people were and why they were doing what they were doing. Jiuming Zhang is Meiying’s father but there is no mention of her mother, Suyin (Bingbing Li) who was romantically involved with Jonas at the end of the first film. (Bingbing Li was apparently attached to the film in 2022 but dropped out for undisclosed reasons.)
- You get the briefest of sketches of the “team” before you are supposed to deeply care about them during the dive. (You really don’t care!)
- The story is bat-shit crazy and full of holes:
- The opening container-ship heroics by Jonas seem like they have been lifted from another “Expendables” film and rammed into the plot for no good reason.
- The ‘Mana One’ platform has been there for at least 5 years, yet some Latin American mining company (WTF??!!) has managed to build a unfeasibly huge underwater mining facility on the sea-bed near them!
- Jonas is able to swim between airlocks at 25,000 feet down. Apparently the “physics” is OK provided he does something (I don’t know what) through his sinuses!!
- The ‘little dinosaur critters’ presumably escaped from The Trench as well. Fun Island is said to be 75 km away from The Trench, yet the little chubby “doggies” with limited swimming ability manage to get there ahead of the Megs. And why would they all swim in that direction anyway?? (Because the script said so!)
- What is the motivation behind the boss-lady Driscoll (Sienna Guillory) doing what she is doing? Purely greed? It’s a horribly constructed and one-dimensional character.
- The whole thing smacks of the writers saying “Oh f*** it, stick it all in – ‘they’ won’t notice”.
- Some of the action scenes are so frenetically edited that it is impossible to work out what is going on. The underwater battle just outside the mining lab is a case in point: a lot of confusing CGI mush that is both banal and bland.
- The character of DJ (Page Kennedy), the ‘black funny guy’, is like some terrible throwback to the action films of the ’80s.
- Just as for the first film, the Chinese involvement in the production is writ large – ridiculously so. A good proportion of the film is in Mandarin with subtitles. (And I think a non-English speaker even did the subtitles: I made the mistake of seeing a sub-titled showing, and during the playing of some soundtrack music the subtitle “(Enchanting music plays)” appears. I was not enchanted!)
- In fact the whole film is like some sort of cultural bingo. As well as the White and Chinese involvement, we have a Latin American villain (actually, actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta is Spanish) and actresses Melissanthi Mahut (who is Greek/Canadian) and, as a representative for the Pakistani market as Sal, Kiran Sonia Sawar (who is acutally born in Scotland). The one thing it is lacking is some LGBTQ+ characters (where is Ruby Rose when you need her?)…. but then, the Chinese would have censored the shit out of that.
Summary Thoughts on ”Meg 2: The Trench”
I find it really sad that “Meg 2” is such trash. From all of those hoards of people who flocked in to see “Barbenheimer” last week, there much have been a good proportion who said “You know, going to the cinema is quite fun…. let’s go again this week”. This film may make them reconsider their future entertainment spend.
There’s actually a really shocking moment in this film. It comes right at the end when the title comes up “Directed by Ben Wheatley”. Wheatley was the director of the innovative offerings “Sightseers” (2012), “High-Rise” (2015) and “Free Fire” (2016). Even his remake of “Rebecca” in 2020 (which I’m sure I wrote a review for, but can no longer find) had its moments. “Meg 2: A Terrible Stench” is such a confused mess of a movie that I find it astonishing that Wheatley would tarnish his brand by having his name on it. I’d have read this script and said “Nah… I’ll pass”!
Sadly, two of my grandsons enjoyed “The Meg” very much and want to see this one next week, when we are ‘holiday-sitting’ them. The things I do for love.
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Trailer for “Meg 2: The Trench”:
The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG91B3hHyY4 .
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