Movie Review: The Meg 2: The Trench

What is hardest to understand about the new sequel to the 2008 movie “The Meg”, “Meg 2: The Trench” about a prehistoric shark called a Megalodon, is that this film is so bad that the producers guaranteed that there will never be a third installment. Why write a script this bad, and then spend millions of dollars on a sequel that ruins any chance of an ongoing franchise? All because of one bad movie, millions of dollars will now be lost on a rushed, bad idea, when all they had to do is create about three more script re-writes. The producers probably thought, it’s been 5 years since the original, let’s strike now when people still remember the last movie, forgoing any thoughts of writing a good script first.

For this screenplay, there is no real story, no connectivity, the transitions make no sense and are just excuses for action scenes with characters flying in and out and new insane creatures that come out of nowhere, including a giant Octopus and killer lizard creatures that are never explained. The plot involves some woman in their scientific party who betrays the other scientists, several whom were in the last (and much better) movie, with the exception of actress Bingbing Li. Bingbing Li was killed off for this sequel and perhaps she is the only actor who actually read the script and correctly decided to run for her life.

The motivations of the characters, the logic of what is going on, and even the special effects are all poorly offered within this film. For this sequel, there are not nearly enough giant shark scenes, and the scenes that do have the shark, are frequently too dark to see anything impressive. One reason for this is most likely because there was not enough budget to create special effects as good as the last movie, so they have way too many scenes at night and underwater, so they could save money.

Actor Jason Statham once again appears in this sequel and this time around has some karate scenes, along with young actress Shuya Sophia Cai, who stole the previous movie with her amazing cuteness. Unfortunately, there are not enough scenes with her in this sequel, but once again she steals this movie as well, even though it is stunningly bad.

We have all seen too many lucrative sequels destroyed by a bad screenplay, once again showing how mandatory and how difficult it is to create the story first, making sure it is great, before spending so many millions on a bad film that in this case, has wrecked another movie franchise.

The Rotten Tomatoes for this shark sequel are a correctly low 26% and I agree with this number and recommend seeing the first movie and miss this one.