All chomp, no romp

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This article was published 04/08/2023 (952 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With deeper dives, bigger monsters and more megalodons, this sequel to 2018’s The Meg promises Jason Statham kicking giant sharks in the head and delivers Jason Statham kicking giant sharks in the head. But it doesn’t seem to enjoy it much.

Meg 2: The Trench starts with a flashback, all the way to 65 million years ago, showing us an eat-and-be-eaten chain of animals from a flying insect to a little lizard to a small dino to a big T. Rex and then on to our main monster, the megalodon.

Flash forward to the present, and the movie asks this implicit question: Who’s the apex predator now?

The first Meg movie was directed by Jon Turteltaub, a journeyman filmmaker who took a story about a murderous 20-metre prehistoric shark — adapted from a Steve Alten novel — and played it relatively straight, resisting outright Sharknado campiness and delivering a solid summer creature-feature with just a bit of a wink.

This time out, the action is overseen by British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, known for unnerving indie horror films (Kill List, A Field in England), unsettling satirical comedy (The Sightseers) and a sardonic, stripped-down action flick (Free Fire).

You might think a better filmmaker would yield a better film, but this seems a bit like getting Nomadland helmer Chloe Zhang to try her hand at Marvel superheroes: It’s not a great fit.

The obvious battle in Meg 2 is “humans versus prehistoric creatures,” but the underlying conflict is “Ben Wheatley versus the blockbuster template.” And Ben loses.

Unable to apply his subtle, sly, dark sensibility to a big dopey shark flick, Wheatley never quite commits. The result is a weirdly divided movie that dutifully hits its marks — making cinematic references to The Abyss, Jurassic Park and, of course, Jaws — but never has much fun.

With a script by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris, who also worked on the original, the story sees the return of Statham as super-skilled rescue diver Jonas Taylor. Statham’s blunt charisma and laconic comic delivery are as reliable as ever, but they only go so far.

Jonas is working at the international marine research institute once co-headed by Suying, a scientist, diver and — it’s implied — Jonas’s one-time love interest. The character was played in the 2018 movie by Li Bingbing, who has not returned for the sequel, and while there’s a two-second visual acknowledgement of Suying’s offscreen death, it remains unexplained. (Sure, action movies have to get on with things, but, wow, this is cold.)

The institute is now headed by Suying’s estranged brother, Jiuming (Chinese martial arts star Wu Jing, who brings a lot of energy and elan to the action scenes), with funding from Hillary Driscoll (Sienna Guillory), a “move-fast-and-break-things” venture capitalist, whose pious talk about “protecting fragile ecosystems” makes clear she’s actually up to no good.

Along with some new crew members, who get purely perfunctory introductions, there are some familiar faces, including Cliff Curtis as Jonas’s pal Mac, and Page Kennedy, whose character DJ functioned as (kind of racist) comic relief in the 2018 film — the panicked, yelling, “Oh, hell, no” non-swimmer — and thankfully, gets an upgrade in this go-round: He is now prepared for cool action in any emergency.

Shuya Sophia Cai returns as Meiying, who was a precocious child in the first film and is now 14 years-old, which can be an awkward age. It’s awkward here, mostly because she gets a lot of cute dialogue, and Wheatley has zero interest in cuteness.

The first big set-piece sees two submersibles breaking through the thermocline, heading into an abyss hidden deep below the Mariana Trench, to unexplored depths of 7,500 metres below sea level. The supposedly routine dive goes sideways fast, thanks to sabotage, sinister criminals and some secret under-sea resource extraction.

The ensuing action remains oddly flat, however. Because of recent news stories, billionaire-funded experimental submersibles are a much grimmer subject than the filmmakers could have envisioned when making the movie, but the long sequence is also just murky, incoherent and poorly set up.

Wheatley summons no sense of wonder, no sense of terror, and even when the massive megs arrive — there are three of them now — the danger barely registers, with the characters or the audience.

The final action spectacle comes when the megs, along with other ancient creatures that have lived undisturbed for millions of years, break back through the thermal barrier and head for a crowded tourist resort on what is soon to be the ironically named Fun Island. (Meg fans should keep an eye out for a cameo by the dog Pippin.)

What follows is not so much like the masterful beach scenes in Jaws and more like the chompiest bits of Jurassic World, but Wheatley does at least loosen up and lean into his over-sized material.

Unfortunately, this big B-movie payoff feels a little late.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com