Spoiler: The screenplay and direction of Meg 2: The Deep unfortunately didn’t come up with anything to resolve the scenario that was designed. When the man gets up again, the woman has disappeared. And whoops, a few seconds later a few tentacles have clawed the whole boat. Without excitement, without a gag, not even with a cheap jump scare. The complete lack of creativity in this situation is symptomatic for almost the entire runtime – apart from a few moments, most of which were already wasted in the trailer, which was trimmed for trash fun.
“Man is only limited by his imagination,” is recited in a meaningful speech in the first half. In the sequel to Jon Turteltaub’s Meg (2018), the film adaptation of Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg, which was also continued in various volumes, these limits are quickly reached. Which is particularly regrettable because British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, born in 1972, has taken the director’s chair and, with works such as Sightseers (2012) and High-Rise (2015), has shown his talent for black humour, the abyss and visual sophistication has proved.
In Meg 2 he can access almost none of that. This may also be due to the weak script, again written by Jon and Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris. The dialogue joke is already exhausted with the rhyming of the word “Meg” with “Snack”. The story about an act of sabotage at the marine research center, which we know from the first part, is pretty unattractive, since the villain characters are absolutely uninteresting. Quite exciting is the idea of a megalodon in captivity to be trained; however, hardly anything is made of it.
On a reconnaissance dive into an undeveloped section of the Mariana Trench, in which the environmental activist and former deep sea diver Jonas (rather tired: Jason Statham) and the director of the Oceanic Institute in China, played by the Chinese action star Jing Wu, take part with a crew of four and a “stowaway”. , the crew will not only face a swarm of giant megs and other prehistoric creatures, but also criminals they want to eliminate.
The megalodons initially take a back seat. The events under water, in the course of which the researchers have to walk three kilometers on the seabed in special suits with little oxygen, and finally back on the research station, which has now been taken by the bad guys, reminds Meg 2 of cucumber shockers like Deep Star Six (1989) or Octalus (1998) and Action B-Ware like Red Alert (1992). The whole thing is reasonably solid in terms of craftsmanship, but never as wacky as a maritime genre film by Wheatley should actually be.
When Meg 2 moves to a luxury resort called Fun Island in the final third, the pace picks up – but here, too, the staging falls far short of its potential. “There’s a shark!” is yelled to get everyone out of the water quickly. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) masterfully demonstrated how scary and at the same time subtly socially critical and nasty mass panic can be staged. Wheatley, on the other hand, presents us with a confusing mess with too many threats, none of which is really able to trigger anything.
Tentacles greedily reach out, mini dinosaurs dart around, three megs eat their way through a tourist buffet, opponents’ minions shoot around, a helicopter crashes, the heroes rescue vacationers, a dog and repeat each other – and we sit right in the middle and think: So what? Statham keeping things tidy on a jet ski is kinda funny, but overall it’s frighteningly poor.
#Meg #Deep
