A few years ago, there was a movie called The Meg. It was a B movie about a giant shark and some wacky action scenes where some people fought it, blah blah blah. Even if you've never seen the movie, I think you can imagine exactly what it was, if you've seen any movies at all. Sharknado, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, these are common films in the "I remember seeing this on the SyFy channel once in the background" genre. So, can you guess how much money it made at the box office? The answer: over half a BILLION dollars.
Today's movie is its sequel. I was surprised it even got a sequel, because that number above doesn't exist in my understanding of reality. But not only did it get a sequel, it got one with a budget of $185 MILLION. For a random B movie about a giant shark! And what did that budget get us? Well, it got us almost as much actual dinosaur action as the last Jurassic World movie (one single scene). But beyond that, it got us ... well, another random B movie about a giant shark and a group of humans fighting them in wacky action scenes.
I will admit there is something to be said for a movie that simply knows what it is, and knows what it is not, and never pretends otherwise. Does everything in it make sense? No. But is it coherent? Yes! Is it a comedy? No. Does it have some kind of funny jokes? Yes! Is it a serious drama about the ecological impact of humans on the ocean? No. But does it have Jason Statham doing a Snyder-style slow-mo jump with a jetski to stab a megalodon with a hand-crafted explosive spear? Of course it does.
None of this means the movie is particularly good; it is in its soul a B-movie creature feature. But it does do a surprisingly good job managing the line between being tethered to some semblance of reality and being light-hearted and ridiculous. It's not a very easy job and I think it mostly manages. It does suffer a little from trying to do too many different things (a trait I suspected it inherited from the source material, which I'll discuss below). And sometimes its ridiculousness does undercut any sense of drama it might have. But when I sat down to watch it, I knew what it was going to be, and its audience knows what it is going to be, and perhaps most importantly the movie has the self-awareness to know it, too: a movie which critics will absolutely loathe and audiences will mostly be satisfied with.
Score: 5/10
IMDb: Meg 2: The Trench
PS: I learned that the Meg is based on a book series. If you had asked me to guess which movies were based on books I'd have literally never picked it, even having exhausted the entire cinematic catalog. In fact, I learned this once before, after watching the first movie a few years ago, but my brain totally rejected the knowledge and I re-learned it again this week. There are 7+ books in the series! They were written long before the movies! I could feel my brain shattering in real time as I skimmed basically everything about this franchise on Wikipedia.
PPS: One thing I do hate about all movies that involve swimming is how different real-world water is from movie water. Every movie character can hold their breath for 10 minutes at a time, and they can continue to swim downward at enormous depths and at great speed, and they just generally suffer none of the effects of things like "buoyancy" and "drowning." Have you ever tried to swim downward to even the bottom of a mere 15 foot swimming pool?
