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| Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures |
Action star Jason Statham is back for another round against the dreaded Meg. Unbelievably it’s been five years since the original movie about prehistoric sharks making their presence known in the modern world and began eating human bait.
This time, director Ben Wheatley takes over for Jon Turteltaub and delivers an absolutely unnecessary sequel that lacks the comedic edge and originality of the first. Instead of playing up the satirical shark movie tropes, The Meg 2 is more of a take-up on low budget B movies and action flicks of the ‘80s. Sometimes it works and sometimes it woefully fails.
Unfortunately, Wheatley is more suited to low budget fare with actual social commentary like his Free Fire, In The Earth, A Field in England, and High Rise. His directorial style is sold short by a massive studio film that’s only about dollars, not quality of story. Where his other films have an artistic edge, this is a goofy and mostly forgettable shark flick that begs its audience to take rapid fire narrative neglect and abuse. There’s really no story here at all. And he doesn’t understand how to direct this type of mind numbing action in the slightest.
Adding to an ever-growing list of negatives is Wheatley’s lack of using Statham to his full potential. We all know that the man can deliver in several different genres. In the last couple years, Statham has moved outside his comfort zone and done dark thrillers like Wrath of Man that saw him set aside type casting and do something fresh. With The Meg 2, he circles his own wagon and comes up short, mostly due to lack of material to work with. This script (although fun) doesn’t do enough with its premise and wastes too much time on human conflict and gun play.
Listen. When you’ve got some fairly decent creature design and cool looking mega monsters, use them. This could have been an all-out brawl between a massive octopus and the megalodons, but instead spends much of its time on stupidly evil men with no real motives or arc, just shooting guns and blowing shit up to fill time and to waste space.
Maybe it’s okay for something like The Meg
2 to be pure escapist fun with no real stakes or character building. However, the real issue here is the ten steps backwards it takes. Even though the first movie falls into this same category of dumb summer fun, it had this larger than life scale to it. Its nods to its predecessors was apparent. The silly science was a saltwater blast that drowned its audience in fresh blood and hysterical laughs with Rainn Wilson hamming it up. This just lacks ALL OF THAT. When you’re going to make a sequel to something so apparently brainless but with quality popcorn entertainment standards , you really need to find a way to up the ante. This just doesn’t do anything worthwhile while Statham stands around looking absolutely bored to tears, all while a gigantic shark is trying to chomp him and his cohorts to bits.
Wheatley should have brought his flair for weirdness to this movie. He could have made something excellent if he would have stood his ground by bringing his dark tones or themes along for the ride. It just feels like he phoned it in and checked all the necessary boxes as requested by the studio execs. This would have been better suited as made for cable shark flick.
This was a good paycheck for Statham and a low mark for what seems to have been an extremely popular book franchise.
-CG