Review: The Meg 2 The Trench – This Shark Is Confused

It’s not often you come across a movie that ends up being terrible. Sometimes, movies just don’t click with you for any number of reasons. It can be due to a lackluster story, terrible effects, bad acting, or even a combination of everything. The Meg 2: The Trench is a bad movie that has some good elements in it, but ends up being a lackluster experience that is confused as to what kind of story it wants to be. One honestly cannot tell if The Meg 2 is trying to be a movie similar to JAWS, Jurassic Park, or any other generic action movie. And unfortunately, it tries to be all three and ends up failing at all of it.

The Meg 2 The Trench takes place around five years after the events of the first film. Jonas Taylor, played by Jason Statham, works with Mana One in fighting ecological crime in the ocean while also helping to explore the area underwater known as the Mariana Trench. A giant shark, known as a Meg, is raised in captivity at Mana One in hopes of studying the creature and learning more about the Mariana Trench and its wildlife. While Jonas and a team of divers go out to explore the Trench, the Meg breaks out and follows the team out to deep sea and groups up with other Megs hidden in the area. As the team explores, they discover a hidden underwater base that is mining rare earth materials without anyone’s knowledge. While looking for the truth, things go sideways due to sabotage and betrayal from within Mana One, causing Jonas and his team to fight for survival against the Megs lurking underwater.

The overall setup of The Meg 2 seems alright at first but quickly goes off the rails with so many plot points and characters getting thrown into the mix. The movie would’ve been far better had it focused on the premise of Jonas and his team trying to escape the Megs underwater after things are sabotaged. But unfortunately, the plot brings in multiple things that have nothing to do with The Meg that take up a lot of space within the movie, including other monstrous wildlife like a giant octopus that appears with no real explanation. The first part of the movie is about the underwater facility that’s discovered, while the rest of it takes things to land and totally jumps the shark with its plot, pun intended.

The action you see in The Meg 2 is hit or miss in many scenes. A lot of the CGI effects with the giant sharks can often be difficult to see, mostly due to low lighting and quick cuts that don’t let you take in the visuals of the monstrous predators. This is offset by many scenes involving Jason Statham fighting mercenary bad guys and gun fights that are littered throughout.

It’s not too often that these moments coincide with The Meg, where we see the sharks start eating people, at least until near the end. By that point, the movie begins to go so over-the-top with its logic that one might not even care what is happening. There are people getting attacked by the Megs, a group of mercenaries hunting down our heroes, dinosaur-like lizards running around attacking people, and a giant octopus coming to the surface. All of that makes absolutely no sense together and feels incredibly unbalanced and shallow in the movie.

Much of this is made even worst by some of the performances of the cast. While Jason Statham plays the same rugged hero he always plays in every movie, everyone else feels just as shallow and one-note in the worst way. Some characters feel like they’re pulled out from other movies and stick out terribly with their lines of dialogue, often feeling like poor attempts at making one-liners.

While the calmer moments between Wu Jing and Shuya Sophia Cai (who play Jiuming and Jonas’ stepdaughter Meiying) are good parts, they’re completely overshadowed by everything else that works out terribly. Page Kennedy as the engineer DJ stands out as one of the most annoying characters in the movie, with moments that are intended to be funny but end up coming off as awkward and completely out of place. The humorous bits with his backpack having various tools he needs by the end feel tacked on, as if they were last-minute additions to the story to break up the action. At the beginning of the film, he feels like a completely different character than what he is at the end, and not in a good way.

The rest of the cast is as forgettable and mediocre as you think. The explanation for why certain things happen, as well as the sabotage, are quickly glanced over and not detailed. It feels like another detail that was added at last minute before rushing the plot towards the big action scenes at the end. Characters that are relevant to this are quickly shoved out of the plot by the time things get crazier with the climax of the story, making their presence in the movie feels like a waste of time. The big baddie who is responsible for many things is dealt with in a very haphazard way that feels poorly thought out, especially when it could’ve been done a lot cleverer and in relation to the Meg itself.

The Meg 2 is not a good movie, and even worse as a sequel. While it has some noteworthy moments here and there, they’re unfortunately not enough to make the time to watch this movie worth it. The story is all over the place, the characters are forgettable, and the special effects only go so far as to be decent. There are better movies out there that are either shark-related or walk the same line as those with prehistoric beasts terrorizing humans. The Meg 2 is honestly a giant loss that you’re better off avoiding in comparison. Nothing great to see in these waters.

What do you think of The Meg 2: The Trench? Are you a fan of sharks or movies about sharks? Tell us your thoughts about everything in the comments down below!