Main cast: Jason Statham (Jonas Taylor), Wu Jing (Zhang Jiuming), Sophia Cai (Meiying), Page Kennedy (DJ), Sergio Peris-Mencheta (Montes), Skyler Samuels (Jess), Sienna Guillory (Hilary Driscoll), and Cliff Curtis (James “Mac” Mackreides)
Director: Ben Wheatley
Meg 2: The Trench of course follows The Meg, but alas, Jonas Taylor lost his wife between these two movies because Li Bingbing has fallen out of favor with the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Sadly, that daughter is still here, and she still hasn’t learned not to sneak away with the grown-ups when these grown-ups are hunting down giant monstrous shark-like creatures.
Anyway, Jonas is now a single father and an action hero that busts up the operations of people trying to smuggle endangered species and what not. He’s also working for his brother-in-law Jiuming, whose company Mana One is financed by Hillary Driscoll to (a) study the female Meg they called Haiqi in their care and (b) explore further the Mariana Trench that the Meg in the previous movie came from, because these people can’t leave things be.
What follows is a predictable chain of events—Jonas and Jiuming go down in that small sub thing to look around, the idiot daughter stows away in it, and look, Haiqi breaks free and goes to do the humpty-dumpty with two big-ass Megs in the trench.
Oh, and since we need to one-up the previous movie, we have now also a giant octopus and cute little amphibian man-eaters called Snappers. Yes, we have cute dinosaurs now, because, I don’t know, Jurassic World Dominion isn’t awful enough and the world needs to be a bleaker place.
Not only that, Jonas learns that Driscoll has been using her investment in Mana One as a front to secretly launch an underwater mining operation led by, conveniently enough, Jonas’s archenemy Montes.
So, we have people trying to kill one another, Megs and monsters trying to kill these people, and then there is the inevitable climax of the monsters attacking tourists and the good guys having to go save everyone.
The whole thing is a significant step down from the first movie, because this one is incoherent, even more nonsensical than the previous movie, and ultimately, boring, and that’s not just because Jason Statham wears way too much clothing throughout the film.
Sure, this thing has a very by the numbers feel, but it also basically plagiarizes the first movie, rehashing so much of the stuff found in the other movie in a way that feels lazy and uninspired. Worse, this movie opts to rehash the most annoying stuff, the worst being the stupid, stupid daughter that still has no common sense. Yes, the dumb dog that just can’t get killed is also here.
Perhaps it won’t be so bad if the whole thing ended up being fine, but thee whole thing ends up being instead a slightly better than Syfy affair right down to the bad and cheap-looking CGI and stupid antics of people that seem to have zero peripheral vision.
It’s a damn shame. Mr Statham is almost 60 but he still looks fine and in top form as an action hero, and he ends up in “starring vehicles” such as this one. Is starring in films from The Asylum the next step in his career? Then again, sometimes movies from that studio can be entertaining, which is far more than I can say about this snoozer.
