Meg 2: The Trench - When 'Jumping the Shark' is Actually a Good/Bad Thing
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B-plus
Director Ben Wheatley gives the summer blockbuster the finger, and it’s the funniest damn thing I’ve seen this year. Meg 2: The Trench is flawed to perfection; a satirical pummeling of commercial cinema and the first out of gate with a Barbie send-up.
Thriving on stilted performances and inane dialogue, Meg 2 is as big and as stupid as a movie can be short of having Dolph Lundgren show up in a cameo dogpaddling in a shark suit. It’s not so much that the worse it gets, the better it is (although that is the experience). It’s more that Wheatley hits all the wrong buttons in all the right ways. Who knew that was even possible?
Having Wheatley direct a commercial Hollywood sequel is as baffling a scenario as you’ll ever be asked to wrap your head around. That is until you’re asked to wrap your head around the idea that a giant killer shark movie can be family friendly.
I consider Wheatley a B-movie director for the art house set; a Hollywood outsider with no indication he’d have it any other way. So, ask not how Wheatley came to the gig, but how the gig came to Wheatly.
It’s a question the studio—who opted to not show the film to critics in advance—might be asking themselves. But they offered Wheatley the brass ring, and he ran with it like a con man given access to their bank account. Wheatley knows he’s the wrong guy for the job and does everything in his power to make certain the audience knows it too. Then he rewards us—big time—for playing along.
And it’s not like Wheatley’s actors aren’t up for the joke.
Jason Statham returns as Jonas the lone-wolf eco-warrior jumping deeper into the deep end than in The Meg (2018) - 25,000 feet deeper, I believe. Statham delivers what Statham does by squeezing free from tight situations and pummeling oversized villains. (And there are more villains in this movie than there are fish in the sea.)
The rest of the cast fall in line with their assigned roles—stock characters rescued from a lost and found bin discovered in Irwin Allen’s abandoned office. The good guys exchange clever quips moments after their colleagues become fish food while the bad guys evilly flaunt their arrogance by drinking brandy out of snifters.
Cliff Curtis, whose waterlogged resume includes not only two Meg movies, but Whale Rider (2002), The Fountain (2006), The Pool (2005), Deep Rising (1998) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), also returns, embracing his role as Mac, Jonas’ seaworthy sidekick. For his efforts, Curtis is rewarded with the movie’s best line.
Shuya Sophia Cai returns as Meiying, the little girl who, in the first Meg movie, stood nose to nose in a perilous encounter with the Megalodon. She’s older and more precocious than ever. Meiying is the film’s most conventionally artificial role, performed by Cai with a clunky spirit of reckless determination. It works because it doesn’t.
However, the most pressing observation is that Wheatley, despite making us wait, delivers with a significant spike in the kills over the last Meg. Granted, the kills are G-rated (remember? family-friendly) but they’re impressive kills, nonetheless.
There is some distraction knowing that Wheatley is at the helm. It can put viewers on high alert waiting for the Wheat-isms. The Wheat-isms are there, mostly in a set design reminiscent of High-Rise (2015), with a few gentle nods to A Field in England (2013) and many not so gentle nods to Free Fire (2016).
But these Wheat-isms pop up because they are innately Wheatley and not because he’s out to leave his mark. For Wheatley, Meg 2 is a whole new kettle of fish. Clown Fish, I would think.
Meg 2: The Trench is directed by Ben Wheatley and stars Jason Statham, Jing Wu, Cliff Curtis, and Shuya Sophia Cai. Meg 2: The Trench is currently playing in theatres.