The Meg 2

I vaguely remember seeing The Meg at a drive in theater during shark week. And though I personally am very confused by the fascination with shark movies I think The Meg is a delightful kind of bad. So when I found out that The Meg was getting a sequel I was very excited. You know a movie is going to be plotless when it stars Jason Stathem. So here we go with my thoughts on The Meg 2: The Trench.

“Is the experiment do I taste good?”...Okay gotta appreciate the dialogue in this movie.

Look, I have absolutely no problem with movies that exist for purely entertainment purposes. In fact if the film recognizes that that is what it is then those kinds of movies can be very entertaining. Cocaine Bear for example was amazing, it knew exactly what it was and it didn’t try to be anything else. It was fun, entertaining and an actual good movie. That is what I was hoping for from this movie. Maybe some camp, a ridiculous plot that can barely be considered such because the movie was mostly made up of action scenes. However what we got was a clearly low budget, plot heavy mess.

Let's start off with the fact that in its nearly 2 hour run time The Meg made an appearance for approximately 8-10 of those minutes. We spent a good 40 minutes diving and in the trench with absolutely no creatures whatsoever. This is where the forced plot comes in. We all wanted to see a fun and pointless shark movie. Yet instead we got a really weird shoehorned plot where the face of a company is mining in the deep sea and it's all about money. Now here’s the thing…if the plot was actually well thought out and developed I may not have had a problem with it. But the reality is that they contained the entire poorly written and executed eco terrorist plot to the 40-45 minutes we were underwater and then we finally got Meg. AND you didn’t need a plot…no one with more than a single brain cell expected a story from something called The Meg 2: The Trench.

It was also very clear that this film used its entire budget in hiring Jason Stathom because we somehow ended up with 3 prehistoric creatures, none of which made sense together and none we actually got to see very well. I’m pretty sure The Meg in the first movie is a lot bigger. They clearly wanted to save money on visual effects and the movie suffered for it. I don’t think anyone watches shark movies to watch dudes with guns. We want to see the sharks dammit. What would have been really cool is that colossal squid vs the meg…that would have been awesome and we could have had 10 minutes of them fighting but no we got dudes with guns and some tentacles.

Overall the film was lazy, underwhelming and bad. And not bad in a fun way, I will probably watch this movie a lot kind of way. In a truly, why did we waste money on this at all? kind of way. It was a cool concept. I think there were at least 3 movies worth of good ideas in there, none of which were developed or executed correctly. I had high hopes because I really love bad but entertaining movies (part of the reason the Fast and Furious franchise even exists) but this was not fun, it was upsetting. Bring back the days of bad shark movies with good visual effects because that's what we all want anyway.