Have you ever gone to a casino and played one of those Chinese-theme digital machines? Their screens burst with vibrant colors and loud noises. You push the “play” button and a bunch of squares flip over and pixels zoom around. The player really has no idea what is happening until it all ends, and their money is gone.
That is exactly what watching Meg 2: The Trench is like. I’m not going to worry about spoilers in this review. I honestly don’t know if I could spoil the movie. It’s all a blur to me.
Meg 2: Cinema Megiddo
About thirty-five minutes into Meg 2, I began to get scared. It wasn’t because the movie was terrifying. It is a soft PG-13. I got scared because I could not tell what was going on, and I began to worry that my dementia had jumped up another notch. Visions of leaving the theater and mistaking a drinking fountain for a urinal filled my head.
But then I thought…Wrenage, before you left for the movie, you were building a robot friend to help alleviate your crippling loneliness. Building a robot is no mean feat. It requires cognitive ability, especially when using a real human brain in the intelligence cortex (don’t worry; the brain came from a Star Wars fan, so it wasn’t needed). Surely, it’s not you. It’s the movie.
As near as I can tell, the plot of Meg 2 is somewhere in the vicinity of this summary: Jason Statham goes to the bottom of the ocean where he finds mating Megs and a mining platform. The miners are mad Jason Statham saw them, so they try to kill him. A whole bunch of loud noises happen, and then Statham rides a jet ski. The end.
I’m tempted to think I left out something important, but that is impossible. Nothing important happened in this movie, other than a self-important red carpet premiere somewhere.
Meg 2: Megma
Ben Wheatley directed Meg 2. This created some excitement, as Wheatley directed the bonkers Kill List and some other psychological horror movies. His presence led to some hope for a unique take on a giant shark movie. Further good vibes were poured on the fire when Wheatley let it be known in interviews that he put a lot of thought into Meg 2. Due to COVID delays, he was able to sit down and meticulously plan the flick out.
If by “plan” Wheatley means sitting on a couch, eating donuts, and smelling his own emissions for a few months, then, yes. Meg 2 was meticulously “planned.”
I’ve seen some incoherent movies, but Meg 2 has to be up there with the most baffling of them. Suddenly, every bad shark movie in the history of the world looks better by comparison.
Meg 2: The More The Meggier
One of the selling points of Meg 2 is that there are three Megs this time. This borders on false advertising. For a giant shark movie, the amount of shark time Meg 2 dispenses to the audience is minimal. We are talking Immortan-Joe-giving-water-to-the-people minimal. The fish are virtually unused through the first 90 minutes of the movie. They do little other than zip by the camera here and there.
You know how the trailer sells Meg vs. Kraken action? By the time that scene rolled around, I was jaded enough to start counting in my head how long it lasts. The battle between a Meg and the Kraken lasted for approximately 22 seconds. It didn’t even have an ending. The Meg zipped into frame, chewed on the Kraken a bit, the Kraken squeezed the Meg a bit, and then the two of them zipped out of frame. Battle over.
I can only imagine the accountants at the Meg 2 production companies high-fiving each other over all the money they saved on rendering special effects.
“But there is hardly any shark action in Jaws either!” some Meg fanboy yells from the back row. We won’t even answer him. It is crueler to let him live in his delusions.
What about the cast of Meg? What about them? The most credit one can give them is that they hopefully paid taxes on what they got paid. Then the government can somehow use those monies to benefit us all, maybe by spending the money on making the sun stop being hot or something.
Meg 2: Megged
This is not a good movie. This is not a good-bad movie. I’m hard-pressed to know for sure if it even counts as a movie. At the most basic level, a movie has a beginning, middle, and an end. You can tell Meg 2 has a beginning and end because credits clue you into these facts. As for the middle, it is just flipping squares and pixels zooming around.
Meg 2 was primed to be a gloriously stupid sea monster flick. Such things are possible. Stephen Sommers absolutely nailed it with Deep Rising. If you are tempted to watch Meg 2, go watch Deep Rising again instead. It will float your boat more than Meg 2 does.
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