Meg 2: The Trench
MOAR sharks, one of them is a pet. There is also a giant octopus too (don’t call it a Kraken). The Chinese money is smellier this time, about half the film is spoken in Mandarin, the rest is shark grunts and Statham vocalisations.
The premise is getting sillier, so of course they deploy the superhero antics. The internal consistency remains, that’s the most important.
There’s loads and loads of characters, mostly for being brutally eaten by sharks, that remains a constant throughout the film. The octopus doesn’t score much, but there are also those small dinosaur dog-crocodiles from King Kong.
Eventually they are thinned down into the final survivors: our protagonist Statham, the little girl from the first film, a non-lesbian military girl, the protagonist’s boss, the comic relief gansgta dude, and the Chinese billionaire MacGyver. That’s a lot of people.
The plot is straightforward, bad hombres want to strip mine the sea floor to get many rare earths (something that China controls vast amounts, not even a wink anywhere). The good guys find out and need to be rubbed out, being Thunbergian eco-freaks is only a bonus. The antagonists are within, most are turncoats working for the billionaire MacGyver, all Americans. The PR lady, the comms expert, and the security guy playing Josh Brolin with all the fiber in his being.
I’m guessing Ben Wheatley (director of High-Rise) had no input over most of the film. There’s nothing subversive here.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.