Meg 2: The Trench evaluate: a shark film drowned in stupidity

Sharks aren’t the one animals with horror film cred. However whereas creature options have tackled virtually each generally identified animal below the solar (or sea, or elsewhere), there’s not, say, a big-studio killer-snake film each two or three years.

It’s nonetheless hanging that sharks — simple to demonize due to their dead-looking eyes and supposed relentlessness, and due to the enduring reputation of Jaws and TV’s Shark Week — have impressed such a spread of horrors, from stripped-down and intimate (The Shallows) to downright grim (Open Water) and again to SyFy-level chintz. The latter is the damaging water that Meg 2: The Trench winds up occupying, risking self-annihilation for the sake of typically self-conscious silliness.

Although 2018’s The Meg was a long-gestating adaptation of a Jaws-ish novel, it didn’t bear a lot resemblance to the all-time shark film champion. Meg 2 swims additional away; it might be the primary big-budget shark film to so totally rip off Deep Blue Sea, itself a champion of Jaws ripoffs. With its broader menagerie of killer sea creatures, Meg 2 additionally owes a debt to Steven Spielberg’s different megahit creature characteristic, Jurassic Park (or, extra precisely, the goofier moments of its Jurassic World sequels). What the collection lacks, in comparison with its unofficial supply materials, is horror film nerve: The primary film might barely muster the fortitude to let its gigantic prehistoric sharks really eat any scrumptious people.

Meg 2 stays a PG-13 affair, even with director Ben Wheatley, greatest identified for violent thrillers and darkish comedies, stepping in for the man who made Phenomenon. The brand new movie rejoins Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), now utilizing his seafaring brawn to struggle environmental crimes on the behest of the Oceanic Institute and making repeated submarine journeys right into a lost-world trench (presumably as safety element, having defeated an escaped megalodon within the earlier movie). The creatures are saved at bay by a thermocline, a layer of shifted-temperature water trapping them of their habitat — save one megalodon, who has been inexplicably raised in captivity by the well-meaning but deeply silly scientists. (That is such a dumb concept that the film can’t regard it as a comfort, and appears unsure about find out how to make it a plot level.)

Suyin (Li Bingbing), the oceanographer from the earlier Meg, has been unceremoniously killed off display between motion pictures, forsaking her now-teenage daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai). Meiying is keen to comply with in her mother’s ocean-exploring footsteps, whereas each of her surrogate dads, Jonas and her uncle Jiuming (Wu Jing), balk at this concept (Jonas particularly; Jiuming is extra of a daredevil). A big chunk of Meg 2 is much less a monster mash than an underwater journey thriller, which is pretty much as good a strategy to kill time between shark assaults as any. Meiying stows away on a routine trench run, which turns lethal when the scientists (and no matter Jonas is) uncover a rogue mining operation with sudden backing. There are additionally extra megalodons down there, as a result of, as Qui-Gon Jinn sagely identified, there’s at all times an even bigger fish.

Picture: Warner Bros. Footage

There’s no rule, nonetheless, that there’s at all times a better-looking fish. For years, standard knowledge held that nighttime settings and wet climate might assist conceal dodgy visible results, and Meg 2 takes that technique to excessive with its lengthy underwater sequences. The deep-ocean murk and unreal textures don’t simply improve the middling CG; they create simple shortcuts to stylization, with reflective surfaces, pink emergency lighting, and bioluminescence offering Wheatley with higher image-making alternatives than the overlit, ceaselessly ugly authentic. It doesn’t have the painterly textures of 2020’s Underwater (or the moodiness of Wheatley’s smaller photos), however at the very least Meg 2 doesn’t spend as a lot time skimming the floor as its predecessor. If Wheatley appears a bit misplaced as to find out how to wring the utmost quantity of suspense from this materials, he at the very least maintains a location-hopping cornball sci-fi zip.

Sadly, what goes down should come again as much as the floor for a protracted and more and more manic monster-attack climax, because the dangerous guys’ machinations unfastened one other set of megs. Within the film’s last 45 minutes or so, the watery setting solely exacerbates the fakeness of the CG animals, ceaselessly green-screened settings, and even typically the computerized goopiness of the water itself.

It’s not simply the results that falter, both; the modifying hits rising chop as Wheatley cuts between varied mini set-pieces. Nonetheless, he does have some enjoyable with the shoddy-looking monsters, at one level putting a (digital) digital camera simply behind a megalodon’s huge tooth as victims are swept inside its mouth and, presumably, down its gullet (an R-rated model of this shot might have been a terrific B-movie knockoff of a terrifying second from the latest Nope). In fantastic (although, once more, not fine-wanting) B-movie custom, a large squid is proven primarily as an infinite collection of tentacles rising from water. Not one of the creatures have Jaws-like stealth; the megalodons appear positively hooked on swimming with their fins protruding from the floor of the water.

Picture: Warner Bros. Footage

Sharks performing almost as oblivious as their prey is an innovation of kinds, if not a optimistic one. The reality is, Meg 2 has just about nothing to contribute to the shark film subgenre other than a size-does-matter strategy that the film sadly, regardless of a presumably substantial price range, is just too low-cost to correctly exhibit. Its easier spectacle derives from throwing the cartoon stoicism of Jason Statham into the shallowest of deep ends. The charms of different solid members, together with dependable character actor Cliff Curtis and Resident Evil alum Sienna Guillory, aren’t at shark-slaying ranges; Statham is, although, as ever, he’s extra enjoyable in hand-to-hand fight with precise people.

Two motion pictures in, the Meg collection doesn’t appear to have a lot concept about what makes sharks scary, other than the truth that they appeared that approach in different, higher motion pictures. If too many motion pictures have turned sharks into calculating forces of pure malevolence, at the very least these perceive the primal, instinctive terror we might really feel upon the conclusion that many elements of this planet don’t belong to us. The ditch of Meg 2 has no such terror connected, nor a way of marvel. (Extra fantastical Warner motion pictures like Aquaman or Godzilla vs. Kong do a greater job on each counts.) Statham is an indomitable pressure the film largely understands; sharks, in the meantime, stay simply one other barely sketched dangerous man.

Meg 2: The Trench hits theaters on Aug. 4.