The Meg is sharktastic fun, but Meg 2: The Trench is just dissharkening

I love a good shark movie – the more ridiculous the better!  I love everything from Jaws to Sharknado and all its sequels, but especially the brilliant Deep Blue Sea in which a sleeping shark jumps out of its little containment pool in an underwater lab and EATS STELLAN SKARSGARD’S ARM.  There are maybe a couple of shark movies that have disappointed me, but let me tell you, 2018’s The Meg is not one of them!  I also love Jason Statham.  From Snatch to The Expendables, to Crank, to his glorious rivalry with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the F&F sequels, I LIVE!  So, when you tell me there’s a movie with Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark, I am HERE FOR IT!

The Meg opens with an action sequence in which something giant and unseen is destroying a submarine while Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) tries to rescue the people trapped inside.  Fast forward an undetermined amount of time to business mogul Morris (Rainn Wilson) boarding his multi-billion dollar underwater marine biology lab (which we know will TOTALLY sustain being attacked by a thirty ton shark – have the architects not seen Jaws 3 or Deep Blue Sea?) just as his scientists (including Ruby Rose, Bingbing Li, Cliff Curtis, Page Kennedy and Winston Chao who have great chemistry as a team) are about to break through what they believe is an opaque gaseous layer at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, thus diving deeper than any human ever has before.  And then…wait for it…something giant and unseen attacks first their rover and then their sub!  These divers need rescuing, are running out of time and air, and the only person on Earth qualified to perform such a rescue is…JASON STATHAM (I mean Jonas Taylor)!

But Jonas Taylor is retired, living above a bar in Thailand, and drinking his days away as he’s haunted by the trauma of his last mission.  Of course they convince him to perform this daring rescue, but only because his ex-wife (why?)  is one of the three trapped over eleven meters deep in the ocean.  Jonas has long suspected a Megalodon as being the entity that attacked that submarine so many years ago, but he was dismissed as crazy by Heller, the doctor on board (played by Robert Taylor, referred to by my husband as Australian Harrison Ford) – who just so happens to be the SAME doctor on this Mariana Trench project!  Oh the drama!  I don’t want to spoil anything about this suspenseful movie filled with human vs. shark goodness, but I do want to point out two things: 1) there is no shark vs. helicopter moment to my EXTREME disappointment, and 2) Jason Statham did almost all his own stunts in The Meg because he used to be an Olympic diver!  Yes, REALLY!

Both The Meg and Meg 2: The Trench are based on books in The Meg series by Steve Alten which spawned six titles between 1997 and 2018. According to the books, Jonas Taylor isn’t a swashbuckling, deep-diving superhero, but a Paleo-biologist – who knew?!

One would expect Meg 2: The Trench to go even further with the Megalodon’s powers of destruction while exploring more giant species living and thriving in the Mariana Trench for centuries with no human interruption.  Unfortunately, the focus on the actual trench is only early in the movie, and looks like a mix between Armageddon and Avatar.  The dive team encounters a lot of bioluminescence and a couple (literally TWO, well three if you count the giant reptilian eye) not so nice species, but most of their time in the trench is spent outrunning a landslide (oceanslide?) caused by a giant explosion, and figuring a way back to the surface from inside an underwater facility.

Instead, the big conflict isn’t human vs. giant shark, or giant squid, or carnivorous marine reptiles – it is human vs. human.  Humans exploiting the ocean’s resources and taking out anyone who gets in their way in pursuit of obscene amounts of money is just so….yawn.  In the previews, I saw footage of megalodon vs. giant tentacled creature and I expected more of THAT!  Instead, I got a rag tag group of science genius divers trying to save humanity from cranky prehistoric creatures AND fight the bad guys at the same time, which is just not as much fun.  At some point you’d expect the bad guys to stop going after the scientists and try to save themselves at the very least, but no, they just keep attacking the humans until they become snacks for the sea beasts.

The last thirty minutes of the movie ARE kinda fun with the destruction of a small vacation paradise called Fun Island.  There are some callbacks to the first movie and an even higher body count, but it just doesn’t hit the same as the attack on the coast of Thailand in The Meg.  The megolodon vs. giant octopus battle teased in the previews is pretty cool, but I wanted something more like a kraken or paleolithic creature battling multiple megaladons.  And the little dinosaur fish-that-act-like-piranhas-but-can-also-attack-on-land are just far too Jurassic Park.  Seen it.

While a helicopter features prominently in the action, and the helicopter vs. tentacle vs. land/sea dinos vs. terrorists with guns stunts are impressive, I still don’t get my shark vs. helicopter moment.  Swallow sadness. Somehow this movie is completely extra, and completely boring – chalk it up to hackneyed storylines, poor timing, and bad editing, because the formula for shlocky greatness is absolutely there. The BEST transformation between The Meg and Meg 2 goes to Page Kennedy playing DJ who takes the comic relief to a whole-notha-level.

The bottom line is a big, heartfelt YAAAAAAAAAS to The Meg, and *insert raspberry/fart noise here” for Meg 2: The Trench.  Maybe just watch the last thirty minutes, particularly for the Jason Statham jet ski sequence.

The Meg is currently streaming on MAX and Meg 2: The Trench is in theaters now, or available to rent for $19.99 on Amazon Prime.