No one needed a bigger megalodon after 2018’s shockingly dull shark exploit, “The Meg.” But we’re getting one anyway with Ben Wheatley’s outsized shipwreck “Meg 2: The Trench,” a dimwitted sequel committed to plunge into the depths of agonizing boredom, doing so at 25,000 feet, to be exact.
At least the initial chapter came with something that resembled a story. No such luck here, thanks to an inexplicably broad script by Dean Georgaris and Jon and Erich Hoeber (the same trio that penned the first tedious installment) that liberally borrows from “Jaws,” “Jurassic Park,” “Piranha 3D,” “Alien” and so on. In certain sequences, the references from the first two of these pictures feel so shameless that one ponders whether Steven Spielberg would have a legal case against “The Trench” if he didn’t have much bigger fish to fry.
The film superfluously starts in the Cretaceous period to give...
At least the initial chapter came with something that resembled a story. No such luck here, thanks to an inexplicably broad script by Dean Georgaris and Jon and Erich Hoeber (the same trio that penned the first tedious installment) that liberally borrows from “Jaws,” “Jurassic Park,” “Piranha 3D,” “Alien” and so on. In certain sequences, the references from the first two of these pictures feel so shameless that one ponders whether Steven Spielberg would have a legal case against “The Trench” if he didn’t have much bigger fish to fry.
The film superfluously starts in the Cretaceous period to give...
- 8/3/2023
- by Tomris Laffly
- The Wrap
Jon Turtletaub’s The Meg was frustratingly dour and straight-faced for a film that pit Jason Statham’s rescue diver Jonas Taylor and a bunch of research scientists against a prehistoric megashark. And for its first hour, Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench is also a derivative and listless affair, feebly drawing influence from the likes of Alien, Jaws, and The Abyss but never coming close to approximating their mood of tension and horror.
Meg 2 finds Jonas now working as an eco-warrior alongside engineer buddies Mac (Cliff Curtis) and DJ (Page Kennedy) and a few other scientists. Again venturing into “the trench”—the deepest part of the ocean where megalodons, or megs, in the world of the film still flourish—Jonas and his team encounter an illegal mining operation and eventually find themselves trapped and forced to take extreme measures to escape. This underlit stretch of Wheatley’s film...
Meg 2 finds Jonas now working as an eco-warrior alongside engineer buddies Mac (Cliff Curtis) and DJ (Page Kennedy) and a few other scientists. Again venturing into “the trench”—the deepest part of the ocean where megalodons, or megs, in the world of the film still flourish—Jonas and his team encounter an illegal mining operation and eventually find themselves trapped and forced to take extreme measures to escape. This underlit stretch of Wheatley’s film...
- 8/3/2023
- by Derek Smith
- Slant Magazine
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