Most reviews (including, alas, this one) of The Meg 2: The Trench are going to open with some sort of variation on “What the hell happened to Ben Wheatley?” It’s true: Wheatley, best known for making genuinely trippy and distinctly English folk horror pieces with modern twists, has deviated from his mean ever since he helmed the shoot-em-up Free Fire, which was just as much about exploring what exactly happens to a human body in the kind of gun battle you see in your average Tarantino knock-off as it was a crime film. Since then, he’s had one genuine misfire (Rebecca, which was just ill-advised from so many perspectives) and a solid return-to-form in In the Earth, which I genuinely overrated because, unlike most pandemic-filmed horror pieces, it genuinely had a sense of style. But since Free Fire, he’s often been embedded in one destined-for-development-hell project after the other (Tomb Raider 2, anyone?), which makes it all the more surprising that he’d sign up for a Meg sequel, and even more, so that it actually is playing currently at a theater near you.
The Meg movies are strange beasts; part of that is that they’re inelegantly courting two sets of the global film market: Your average Western viewer, of course, and your average Chinese viewer, with all the compromises that come with courting such a broad audience. Normally, the emphasis is on the Western Market first, where the studios know most of their audience will come from, but in cases like this (such as, say, Warcraft), the priority is reversed, and Ameri- and Euro-centric audiences don’t really care too much for that. Most films that aggressively courted the Chinese market in the ’10s – Independence Day: Resurgence, etc. – wound up flopping stateside. China has a thriving national cinema, full of its own blockbusters (many of which are of quality, like The Wandering Earth and any modern-day Tsui Hark movie), but it makes financial sense for Western studios to make movies that don’t meekly flirt with an audience of over a billion potential viewers: they lay it on thick like a liquored-up buffoon at a swingers’ party in 1972 asking every lady in the room what their sign is. What I’m really trying to get at is that these types of cross-cultural blockbusters have been done poorly, frequently, at the expense of one audience over the other or at the expense of both of their times and interests and for the first half of Meg 2, it looks like Wheatley’s destined to do the same.
After a prehistoric flashback and a surprisingly fun opening, in which we’re reintroduced to literal eco-warrior and deep-sea explorer Jason Statham (Jason Statham) breaking out of a storage unit on board a cargo ship and kicking the asses of some faux-Maersk sailors dumping radioactive wastes into the oceans, the movie settles into a very slow gear. The company at the heart of the last Meg feature has now expanded its operations into exploring the depths of the Marianas Trench – best known to people who don’t care much about marine life beyond a Long John Silver’s Seafood Platter for being that absurdly deep part of the ocean that James Cameron once managed to explore – and the movie spends a decent amount of time showing off the fictional tech that would allow for an exploratory team to actually leave a submersible and not get instantly vaporized by the water pressure. Statham’s step-daughter, Meiying (Sophia Cai), has taken up her dearly-departed mother’s passion for ocean exploration, and her uncle, Jiuming (a funny-as-hell Wu Jing), has taken his sister’s role as CEO of said company. They’ve converted an old oil rig into a dock for their vessels and have reunited most of the team from the first film in order to do so because a whole fuckload of Megalodons live down there.
I won’t bore you with the specifics because the movie itself can’t be beaten at that task, but, of course, a routine exploration of the trench’s floor – which is, in contrast to a lot of the CGI in the movie, pretty stunningly rendered in a Fantastic Voyage style, only if you replaced the red of a blood vessel with lava plumage from oceanic vents – but the group discover that they’re not the only people down there. In fact, there’s a whole crew of deep-sea miners extracting rare Earth metals based on an intentionally sunken and modified oil tanker. The Megs haven’t been too happy about that, and the eco-warriors are even less so. As shit wants to do in these movies, shit goes haywire: a lot of the craggy walls of the trench are detonated, and soon enough, they find themselves trapped under a whole bunch of rocks. Statham makes the decision that they should try and walk to the tanker and use the escape pods to get out of there. They fend off Megs and a whole bunch of little raptor-like dudes in their pressured exoskeletons and make their way to the vessel, only to discover that they’ve been double-crossed by someone on the team. At that point, it becomes a fight to survive, and the audience must do their best to stay awake. And trust me, you should, because once they finally make it back to the surface, The Meg 2 actually starts to open up and become genuinely stupid fun.
Wheatley’s approach makes a hard pivot away from po-faced action and survival into absurdist comedy, with Statham and the crew tossing out one-liners as they do even wackier shit involving all sorts of threatening marine life. This lane is purpose-built for a side of Statham’s skills that has emerged with less frequency ever since Nevaldine/Taylor split up, and the Crank series ended. Placing him at the core of what ultimately winds up being a larger-budgeted version of your average Sci-Fi channel original movie – airing during Shark Week, of course – from the pre-Sharknado era, in which it was much harder to tell if the movies were in on the joke or not (they often were) is in some ways a dreamy combo. This is a feature film in which a significant portion of the third act revolves around Statham jet-skiing around an island resort, trying to draw three Megs out to sea so that he can use makeshift harpoon explosives to explode their goddamned heads. If that isn’t the kind of cross-cultural experience the world needs now, what else could it be? What really works about Wheatley’s approach is its escalation: in lieu of the ability to go greater (a more traditional Jaws-knockoff) or gorier (the Piranha remake), he takes an ocean-bound premise and moves it to, essentially, Jurassic Park. It is intentional camp, which, again, Statham particularly excels at.
This is what makes The Meg 2 a novelty: Action and horror are subjective – different cultures will obviously find disparate attributes of a single work worthy of their praise – but comedy, especially in the way that Wheatley does it here, is a grand unifier. I’m not trying to suggest that this is a particularly beautiful shattering of the barriers, but I do think that it provides a path forward for those wanting to engage a global audience without forsaking any party. Despite our frequent protestations of seriousness, we, as a species, find ourselves drawn to an unabashedly ludicrous spectacle presented to us with a wink-and-a-smile. It’s why the Fast and Furious movies are a global phenomenon, and it’s why The Meg 2 doesn’t suck as much as you might think it does: come for the ridiculous premise-fulfilling imagery, stay for the occasional Arnold-esque witticism, leave so satisfied you might even forget about the hour or so of bullshit you had to sit through in order to get there.