Meg 2: The Trench 4K 2023 2160p WEB-DL

Five years after the shark massacre, top-notch diver Jonas Tayler (Jason Statham) is battling environmental criminals trying to make an unfair profit. But the hero also works at an oceanology center located in Asia, and continues to explore mysterious crevices in the Mariana Trench. It is from there that a new threat will come - a group of ferocious prehistoric sharks.

Meg 2: The Trench 4K Review
Five years after the shark massacre, top-notch diver Jonas Tayler (Jason Statham) is battling environmental criminals trying to make an unfair profit. But the hero also works at an oceanology center located in Asia, and continues to explore mysterious crevices in the Mariana Trench. It is from there that a new threat will come - a group of ferocious prehistoric sharks.

From the world of cinematography, albeit kid-hooliganism, Jason Statham moved to the space of memes (his social networks today are full of jokes, which for some reason leave exactly Russian-speaking fans). "The Meg 2", an unexpected sequel to not the most good movie, again forced Statham to go on the warpath with megalodon. And how unfortunate to realize that this slaughter was even more shamelessly thrashy, cheesy graphically and almost akin to "Shark Tornado" (minus the irony). Films and aesthetics that were long ago supposed to be forgotten came back, as if in a terrible and unwelcome dream. It turns out that art about sharks are still ready to watch, and if not penetrate the suspense, then at least have an inquisitive tourist interest: to look at the predators that crawled out of the sand (there was such a movie), spinning in a tornado or, finally, feuding with a bristly star of action movies.

Statham radiates all the same manly charisma of the mechanic and carrier, but with sharks this time no luck - in the movie the presence of predators catastrophically few, although the number of monsters and brought to three. Some scenes with illegal mining of precious metals, rather detailed walks on the ocean floor in exocostumes (there should be something about James Cameron) and in general a lot of tedious introductions and digressions, which slow down the first half of the tape, which looks more like a corporate thriller (here, by the way, Statham fights with environmental criminals).

Ben Wheatley, a director with a well-developed sense of (black) humor, was the main stakes of this naval battle, but his British flair was also woefully lacking: he simply repeated a genre pattern by making a bad sequel to a shark movie (if you recall, that streak started back with the second "Jaws," whose existence they prefer to politely forget). And then Wheatley pushes the opposite buttons in places: when the audience expects to see Statham vs. sharks and nothing but, he tries to get away with dramatization and character revelation: who really cares that much about the story of adopted Mein (that girl from the first film)?

In the third act, "The Meg" is more honest with the viewer, offering him a self-indulgent shark massacre, or rather, a compilation of scenes where Statham rushes on a jet ski with a harpoon and demonstrates his Olympic strength. He, being a swimmer, can hold his breath indefinitely and fight off the shark with only one leg. Statham, however, sometimes did and more impossible things. But Wheatley's picture not only refuses to overcome the cheapness of the first movie, but on the contrary - strengthens it, yielding to the tape of 2018 in graphics, in the staging of scenes, in the observance of some kind of compositional and rhythmic unity. It would be reasonable to immediately release "Meg" on digital platforms, but there is a nuance: underwater scenes can be so dark and incomprehensible that home monitors can only exacerbate the situation. If the movie's characters are rag dolls, the director is guaranteed to use them for his own ferocious purposes - for the audience's amusement. "The Meg" doesn't do either, however, abandoning an endeavor for which no one will ever, ever, ever be judged - the attempt to be cool and self-ironic. The sequel probably could have made a passable B-movie, exploiting low taste and with a heavy dose of fast carbs, but instead of exploring new facets and leaping beyond what is possible, the U.S.-Chinese production delivers a neat, subdued film that loses in one way: it's not even capable of genuine outrage.