Y’know, I questioned the point of making a big-budget B-movie like this back when the first Meg came out, but with the industry still recovering from the COVID shuffle, I especially question it now. Doubly so because of the director for this one: Ben Wheatley. While he has a storied history with out-there horror material (also helping to produce just plain weird shit like Aaaaaaah! and The Greasy Strangler), and he’s done a bit of pop work in the past like directing two episodes of Capaldi-era Doctor Who, I’m… still trying to figure out where this fits in his larger catalogue. And bear in mind that I managed to find something about his Rebecca remake that made sense, so it says something when I’m struggling with this one. Then again, there’s a lot about this film that I’m struggling with.
It's been a minute since a film has struck me with just how dumb its writing is. I’m not talking about bad utilisation of thematic ideas or echoing problematic messages; I mean the characters in this thing are regularly shown making incredibly basic mistakes. Some of this is on the part of the good guys, like when Cliff Curtis’ Mac runs head-first into a cloud of mace spray, but mostly, it’s coming from the non-aquatic bad guys. From the monologuing industrialists that look like they’re auditioning for a live-action Captain Planet reboot (or possibly a Monster Trucks sequel), to the mercenary grunts who can’t seem to prioritise between getting rid of humans or running away from the gigantic sea monsters that have surrounded them, it’s quite embarrassing to see shit like this in a modern release.
Where the idiocy of the character writing gets worse is that… well, it’s a film about giant prehistoric sharks eating people: Why in the actual fuck do we even have human antagonists in this thing? I mean, yeah, the first film had Rainn Wilson as the big greedy billionaire, but even he wasn’t fixated on so distractingly like the bad guys are here. As a result, this film’s approach to pre-human predators ends up falling into the same pit as Jurassic World: Dominion, where the set pieces rely on just about everything else about the environment except the creatures to provide a direct threat. Hell, up until we get to ‘Fun Island’, the megalodons barely even factor in, instead going with the titular Trench and showing Statham and his team needing to walk across it using exo-suits. Cool idea, sure, but not to the extent that I didn’t miss the big sharky boys.
And even when we do get to Fun Island… well, there’s not a lot of truth in advertising there either. Most of it involves seeing vapid vacationers get terrorised and chomped up, just to add more to the overbearing environmental messaging that the mwah-hah-hah-ing bad guys already drilled into the audience’s heads, but to give it credit, there are some cool moments. A lot of the build-up at the start of the film involves bigging-up Statham’s character as the guy who fought a Meg in the last film and survived, really playing up his in-universe badass cred, and… yeah, he certainly adds to that when he comes face-to-face with another Meg. However, because the action scenes featuring him are so reliant on shaky-cam, especially when he’s fighting those non-essential human baddies, the presentation ends up letting him down. By film’s end, it’s Page Kennedy as DJ who ends up making the bigger impact because, when we see him whup some arse, we can actually see it.
But you know what the hell of it is? Even in something this dishearteningly work-for-hire, I can still see some of Ben Wheatley’s creativity poking through the holes of this garbage script. The effects work may be a bit dodgy (and the green-screening is kind of pathetic, particularly during the walk through the Trench), but Wheatley manages to work with the noticeably diminished amount of blood (gotta keep that profitable rating, after all) to still sell the grisly chewing-up of humans and even explosive decompression. Bear in mind that his work on Deep Breath, one of the Doctor Who episodes, involved showing a big hot air balloon made of human flesh; even when neutered, he can still deliver bite. Hell, while the messaging is, again, overbearing, it still fits with his usual satirical M.O. of poking at the vulgarity of the upper crust. I guess this does fit into his bigger picture.
Not that that’s enough to really save this, though. The 5% of enjoyable stupid material here is vastly outnumbered by the other 95% that is annoying and distractingly stupid. It is considerably lame, and honestly makes for another argument to put a hiatus on dinos on film for a while, until we can figure out how to make them interesting again.
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