When Ben Wheatley was announced as the director of the sequel to the fitfully entertaining but toothless and generically bland The Meg, everyone checked the calendars. Surely it was April the 1st, right?
Wrong.
But now that the sequel is finally unleashed in cinemas, its all really rather difficult to see anything of Ben Wheatley in any of it. At all. His trademark hardcore genre smarts have been completely sanded off, his off-kilter wit completely AWOL and his complex, reality-bothering narratives, often co-created with his partner in life and in crime Amy Jump (who’s name is missing here and sadly proves most likely to be the major factor in the lack of Wheatleyness present), replaced with the kind of lacklustre, ham-fisted scripting that would be more at home in a Roger Corman or even worse/better a Bruno Mattei camp classic from days of yore.
In fact, what Wheatley has delivered is in many ways an 80’s style Italian rip-off of the first film, complete with narrative gaps that a swarm of giant Meg’s could swim through and still none of the exploitation ickiness expected from a film about a giant man eater eating, er, men.
But before we get too bogged down in what it’s not, what it is is a direct follow up to Jon Turtletaub’s 2018 soggy blockbuster. Statham returns as Jonas Taylor, now inexplicably some sort of part-time hardcore Greenpeace-esque eco-warrior and part-time resident of yet another new Oceanographic Institute. He now co-parents precocious teen Meiying (Sophia Cai) with her uncle Jing Wu, after her mother (Bingbing Li from the previous film) has sadly passed, all of them now inexplicably looking after a Megalodon pup, who’s birth and presence is a complete mystery, that they have in captivity. Still also obsessed with returning to the Trench that is the home to huge swathes of prehistoric creatures who remain trapped there (thanks to pesky SCIENCE), an exploratory mission involving all our Scooby gang goes awry when it’s discovered that its not just more Megs and other nasty beasties down there…
...scenes that should pulse with excitement plod with a dreary sense of boredom and Wheatley shows his possible lack of experience with creating a traditional big screen sense of exciting spectacle...
There’s just something inherently entertaining about a big screen creature feature. Despite all its story flaws, its lack of any characterisation and howling plot turns, watching Hollywood stars and some decent VFX and production design trapped thousands of feet underwater try and avoid being eaten by all manner of large and small critters can’t help but be solidly pleasurable. And when the film’s second half bursts out of the depths and into the sun-drenched beaches and lagoons of ‘Fun Island’ (really), where all manner of people are served up as lunch on the go, there’s a delicious sense that any notion of logic has completely left the building. When those tentacles of the huge undersea beastie shown heavily in the trailer start to break the surface and grab at anything that moves, its with the same sense of complete preposterousness as the rubber limbed mollusc in classic late 70’s teatime fave Warlords of Atlantis. At times, the amused grin just can’t be helped.
But what the whole thing completely lacks is charm. Steve Alten’s source novels (up to six now) were a pulpy blend of propulsive melodrama and earnest chiller and to some degree, some of that same tone is carried over here. Yet even more so than the first film, its sense of humour seems forced. Statham especially now seems to be parodying himself, with clunky one liners and pained smiles through gritted teeth and it manages to hit that level of seriousness that damns any sense of fun, even when the film itself seems to be pushing it. Cliff Curtis gets it, but he’s a lone voice of amusem*nt in an otherwise vast ocean of po-faced histrionic performances that don’t seem to understand they’re in a monster movie.
And while the quality of its VFX work seems a step down from the previous film (can we all just admit that the last time an actual lifelike shark was put on a cinema screen was back in 1999 with the stunning practical sharks in Renny Harlin’s classic Deep Blue Sea? Every shark since then – EVERY. ONE. – looks less and less lifelike, and here they’re so unrealistic they cease to be any threat at all), the real problem with the film is the horribly anaemic script.
The opening half is rammed full of plot beats that cause the head to just hurt – that worn-to-death chestnut of corporate espionage is wheeled out to yet again give us cliched and uninteresting human antagonists in a film where we already have all the non-human antagonists we need, shoving the actual creatures we paid to see to the fringes of nearly half the entire film. And not just that, there are some logic pummelling scenes that will just cause anyone with even the most basic understanding of science to go ‘wait…what?’ and it all smacks of a complete lack of investment into any decent storyline to go with the rather oversized fishes. Scenes that should pulse with excitement – a terrifying walk across the floor of the Trench for example – plod with a dreary sense of boredom and Wheatley shows his possible lack of experience with creating a traditional big screen sense of exciting spectacle. His attempt at the palm sweating claustrophobia of an undersea rock slide and subsequent submersible trapping is horribly shot in shuddering darkness and edited as if to hide something rather than actually show it.
Even once the chomping begins, while there is the feel that the film has finally let itself go somewhat, it still can't shed its staid and by now dull narrative – the film’s finale which gives us what we’ve all wanted to actually see – Jason Ruddy Statham fighting not one but THREE huge sharks – manages to flub its landing by giving us a horribly uninteresting showdown that seems to prove that once you get over the coolness of a giant shark, you’re then stuck with the problem of what can it actually do…and the answer sadly is not a lot. If only the film had embraced its stupidity and fully jumped the titular monster, but instead it retreads so many of the previous film’s moments and even set pieces that it’s it’s lack of daring in doing anything remotely exciting that disappoints the most. Statham still doesn’t punch a shark, but him trying to harpoon three of them with explosives while riding a jetski really shouldn’t be as boring as it is here.
Having seen the first film, we always knew what we were really getting. There was no way it was ever going to be the full-throated and raucously bloody affair we all wanted (one admittedly cool shot of a feeding frenzy from inside the Meg’s mouth aside). But the promise of what someone as far from the mainstream as Wheatley could do with the property got all our hopes up. Possibly unfairly…but those hopes were raised nonetheless. And for those who enjoyed the first film and don’t mind more of the same but slightly worse, then this is a fun night out. But for those of us who really wanted to see a ‘Ben Wheatley Giant Shark vs Jason Statham jam,’ and even worse enjoyed all the novels and even the first film, that disappointment is all encompassing.
