Rent Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Poor follow up - Meg 2: The Trench review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Loved the first one - a real hoot with everyone in on the gag - so along comes the inevitable sequel - which is not. Begins quite well then after about 20 mins it lurches into an underwater Die Hard crime thriller where the bad guys are mining the ocean floor for precious metals. The result is a seen it all before crime caper with a singular lack of Megs - they are more or less reduced to a cameo in their own movie. After about an hour Wheatley remembers he is supposed to be making a monster movie but all a bit too late by now. The finale is a carbon copy of the finale of the first one plus some bad guys chucked in and a giant octopus that appears with no explanation. I suppose the final reel where The Stath is finally let loose is ok but it’s a pale imitation of the first one. Plus the annoying kid last time round is now an even more annoying teenager. No idea what Wheathley is doing in all this nonsense - and no doubt there will be more in the franchise as it did a brisk trade at the box office - but 2.5/5 for me.

It's daft But Fun....at times! - Meg 2: The Trench review by GI

The inevitable sequel to 2018s The Meg but despite Ben Wheatley taking the director reins this is a bloodless and overdone monster flick that makes the mistake, as they all do, of bringing in more monsters and not being serious enough or humorous enough and taking a middle ground that leaves the film fairly forgettable. Don't get me wrong though there's some fun to be had here and enough nods to Jurassic Park (1993) and Jaws (1975) and their respective franchises to keep a cinephile smiling. I enjoyed the first section of this film where the intrepid crew explore a deep dark oceanic trench in search of prehistoric creatures. This is almost a sci-fi vibe with plenty of disaster, guns and techno gizmos. Obviously the trip all goes wrong and some bad guys surface to add to the plot. The latter half of the film is where the monsters are on the loose and terrorise a beach of screaming civvies, fight each other and are eventually seen to by the hero. This is of course Jason Statham who gets to fight lots of bad guys all the while throwing out quips and asides and dealing with the giant sharks and various other dinosaur things roaming around. The script is woeful but I suppose can be forgiven as this film isn't setting out to be anything other than daft. I smiled a few times and groaned aplenty so in many ways its good that its been kept at a kids level and not upped into a full on horror film although that would have appealed to me more I think.

Abuses the Premise of 'Switch Your Brain Off' - Meg 2: The Trench review by Strovey

The film Meg 2 gives all the appearances of being written by a very excitable 11-year-old who wanted to watch, monsters, robot suits, baddies and see explosions, monsters eating people and a hero killing the monsters, oh and guns and shooting.

Well anyone who wants to watch this has got it and Meg 2 is ten out of ten for that.

If you are over eleven years of age and have a discerning part of your brain that can reason and see at least a fundamental logic then the Meg 2 will annoy you and in fact, as it did with me, bore you.

The positives in it are Jason Statham and Jason Statham and even then I am not so sure I could see the glint of his bank-balance in his eyes because even with his history of hokey and utterly stoooopid films this one towers above them.

The other cast members are ‘I’ve seen him in something before’ and ‘She looks like cut-price Kate Winslett’ and ‘Who?’ They try their best and are enthusiastic but I feel that this film is not their path to fame and stardom even if they were ‘acting with The Stath’ and being directed by ‘Ben – hang your head in shame – Wheatley’.

The opening scene is similar to something I saw on an Attenborough documentary on dinosaurs but was more believable how it occurred and featured a different sea monster because megalodons did not exist at the same time as tyrannosaurus rexes and the whole shock event was just there to say the Meg is bigger and scarier than that Jurassic Park star and much more powerful. Ironically Jurassic Park jumped the shark some time back. This opening ‘wow’ scene does not make any sense and is highly unrealistic and thus we are set up for the entire film.

The visual effects are poor at times, especially things on the surface of the sea, some of the sharks look impressive in certain setups, but other times not so much. I thought the whole octopus part was almost a parody because of what happened and how it looked but no apparently it was meant to be terrifying.

The lizard things, not sure how they lived where they did, not sure why they just went around killing people because predators in my experience tend to kill other animals to eat them. These just wanted to kill people, that was it.

Statham plays Statham as per usual, still does not know how to use a razor but luckily enough for him his stubble stays the same length in perpetuity. He looks like he is carved from granite, he just looks tough, I suspect he probably is fairly tough, so why make his character impervious to the laws of nature and physics? This is a common theme nowadays, even the recent ‘The Killer’ on Netflix set it up with a calculating, clever and cerebral assassin still being indestructible in one scene as his skinny frame survives a battering that would literally kill anyone – why do filmmakers to this? In films made for grown adults?

The film is poor and has little to no redeeming features.

It does however open up an interesting can-of-worms. Clearly the brief was ‘bigger’, and expand on everything the first film had. S, more megalodons, more monsters, more peril, more evil baddies and just more. I have no doubt there is an audience that will lap this up so we will get the terrible prospect of Meg 3: This Time It is Personal soon.

Why can’t the makers, writers and actors look at the first film and say ‘how can we improve on this’ (not difficult but they failed) how can we expand the lore and make it interesting, perhaps we can make it different? Nope, they just doubled down and made it stupider. But this is not the Meg 2’s fault they are just following a too well-worn path now in moviemaking. Is it us the audience’s fault, it seems that films that deal with serious problems or have stories that do not involve explosions and monsters or superheroes do not do as well.

Is the audience getting dumber and the films are being made for them?

Do dopey films make a dopier audience?