That’s the issue proper there, although. With the primary film already chronicling, albeit in humorous vogue, the basic narrative of people discovering and combating an enormous new monster they’ve by no means seen earlier than, that cliché has been taken off the desk for Meg 2. So wanting discovering even greater and meaner megs—the film’s new creatures, known as “Snappers,” are literally smaller, kind of low-rent underwater velociraptors—the film settles for preserving extra copies of the meg from the primary movie lurking round whereas a sabotage thriller rattles round up entrance for greater than an hour.
As for the opposite monsters within the film, together with these Snappers, they’re so spottily generated by CG and so perfunctorily launched, usually in murky underwater scenes which can be barely watchable, that even the sense of awe generated at sure moments within the first film is just not current right here.
We stored ready for Meg 2 to interrupt out, however the first two acts current us with a plot and new characters we care little about (it’s exhausting to even parse the names of all of the undistinguished supporting solid members who die within the first half of the story), in addition to generic, easy-to-spot villains, and hard-to-define stakes. An all-out battle within the finale between monsters, heroes, and enemies on one other island resort actually known as Enjoyable Island does enliven the proceedings with some entertaining deaths and some hilariously heroic moments for Statham and buddies. But it surely all comes too little, too late.
Statham scowls his approach by way of the film, as traditional, and is all the time a welcome presence, however you get the sense that he’s going by way of the motions. And with out a formidable feminine foil like Li BingBing within the first movie (Rigas makes little impression, and the child is simply there to get herself in life-threatening conditions), the film turns right into a half-hearted bromance between Statham and Jing.
That is simply Ben Wheatley’s least attention-grabbing movie, and we hope that if he continues to dabble with making motion pictures within the studio system, he finds a possibility to actually apply his often-skewed, regularly eerie worldview to one thing extra compelling. The Meg discovered a pleasant stability between monster film and camp send-up, and you bought the sense that everybody was in on the joke. However you possibly can’t inform the identical joke twice and get the identical response, and that’s what finally sinks Meg 2 all the way in which to the underside of the Mariana Trench.
Meg 2: The Trench is in theaters Friday (August 4).