Jamie
Meg Meg Meg Meg! We did it. Just when it seemed like no movie could qualify for BMT without hitting 39.9% on RT, we get a film that even dips below 30%. That’s like getting a 5% back in 2005. Take our recent fare, Serving Sara. That goes absolutely roasted by critics. It’s at 4% on RT. Abominable. You’d think the reviews would be like “this film ran over my dog” or something. But nah. They are mostly like “not funny and a waste of my valuable time”… 4%! For wasting the precious time of the reviewer who was warning you not to waste your valuable time on it. Thanks, reviewer. Nowadays reviewers don’t even have the common decency to warn you against mere wastes of time. They are like “maybe you like to waste your time” or “who am I to tell you how valuable your time is” or “time is a mere social construct and in fact cannot be wasted.” Case in point: Meg 2.
To recap, Jason Statham is back, Jack! And boy does he have a kid he’s trying to protect while they live on a research vessel studying The Trench and Megalodons. Seems like a primo place for your kid to be in danger, but you do you Statham. On just another routine mission the research subs are attacked by a Megalodon and they have to dive into The Trench. Things are getting hairy and only get hairier when it’s revealed that Statham’s daughter has stowed away. Entirely unpredictable event! Having veered into unexplored territory they are shocked to find a whole mining operation going on beneath their noses. The eeeevil miners blow up the trench and nearly destroy Statham and the gang. With time running out they make a break for the mining facility and get there just in time (for our main characters at least). They soon discover that this is all a plot by their eeeevil investor and their eeeevil coworker. Despite sabotage and fisticuffs, the gang is able to escape and make it back to the surface. They gather up the rest of the good guys and head to Fun Island, where a few Megs that escaped The Trench via the blast are heading. A big climactic scene occurs where the bad guys try to kill the good guys, the good guys try to kill the Megs, and the Megs try to kill everyone. Eventually Statham wins the day and everyone laughs and laughs and laughs. Oh and his kid is fine, but we all knew that, right? THE END.
The experience of watching this in the theater involved me and Patrick looking at each other over and over as the film devolved into an incoherent mess. At one point I mouthed, “This might be the worst thing I have ever seen” and I wasn’t wrong. When they find a secret laboratory on the bottom of the trench and dinos are attacking them and everything looks like total shit I wondered how in the world this wasn’t a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Fortunately it started to take itself slightly less seriously as the film progressed and so wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen. But it was close. I did not like the trash first film and this one is double trash and the sequel will probably be triple tr… oh, wait, sorry. I forgot my long running character, Franchise Man. Ahem. Here it goes… I loved this film. Feed me more Megs, please, I’ll gobble them up like a good piggy. Oink oink. Franchise Man!
Hot Take Clam Bake! A hot take that was already in play from the first film is even more in play for this film. It’s not even a hot take. It’s an ice cold take. Why in the world is the minor that Jason Statham is the guardian of spending her days in a highly dangerous research lab? I don’t know what the laws are around the world, and if I learned one thing from Armaggeddon it’s that growing up on a highly dangerous ocean rig is pretty great, but still. The girl was nearly killed by a Megalodon already… now she’s just hanging out at the only Megalodon research facility in the world? Someone needs to do something. Get that girl out of there before… damn it, too late, she’s already stowed away on your doomed adventure. Now she’s destined to marry whatever Ben Affleck stand-in you find for Meg 3: Ocean Hole. Congrats. Hot Take Temperature: the ice cold waters of the Marianas Trench.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Are we talking about the worst trailer I’ve ever seen about three giant sharks trying to chow down on Olympic-caliber diver Jason Statham? Good luck, sharks, he’s smooth like a seal and has shark-like speed in the water. Let’s go!
I’m not joking. When the trailer dropped for this guy I gasped at how bad it looked. Walking on the bottom of the Marianas Trench? Giant CGI sharks attacking Fun Island? Shooting guns and battling dinosaurs in the ocean? It looked aggressively dumb and not in the usual way. I shouted (my wife can testify) “If this isn’t BMT there is no God!” Well, we did it boys, God lives (for now …).
The young lady sitting next to me in the theater was on her phone 100% of the time during this film. One might ask why? Why pay for a movie and then not watch it? Only she knows.
We also watched it in 3D. Bar none, this was the worst 3D film I’ve ever seen. There are two pretty major action scenes which are normal action scenes and in 3D they are 100% incoherent. Completely nonsensical.
So what did we learn? We learned that you can swim around on the bottom of the ocean as long as you fill your sinuses with water because water is incompressible. Makes sense … (ignore the air in your GI tract, and I’m going to assume that it would do something to your eyes / brain, but the internet is somewhat inconclusive on this matter).
We learned that after swimming around on the bottom of the ocean you can wake up with no ill-effects and get into a fist fight with a martial artist and be pretty okay. Hot take: I think that maybe in reality filling your entire head with water and passing out might not be something you can wake up and recover from in a hot second.
We learned that dinosaurs live on the bottom of the ocean, but also those same dinosaurs can pop up on the surface and walk around … like that’s totally normal right? Just breathing underwater and then popping out and running around and eating people. That’s how things work in real life right?
We learned that you should definitely have a group of effectively faceless “friends” who can die in various ways. And also that that one person who you declare you’ve been friends with for “four years” but wasn’t in the first film is probably the bad guy.
Speaking of which, one of the good guys was like “we can all trust each other in this room, we need to find the mole” and I practically shouted “blonde-haired lady is the bad guy!” in the theater. So dumb.
A funny Product Placement (What?) for Page Kennedy’s MCM Worldwide survival backpack, probably the only genuinely funny moment in the film. Setting as a Character (Where?) for the Marianas Trench. And Worst Twist (How?) for the “reveal” that the head of the company (and one of the engineers) are in cahoots to mine the bottom of the ocean (!) for some rare material (!) worth billions (!). This film is BMT nonsense and it isn’t boring, which feels abnormal for the big bad BMT blockbusters we usually watch for Live.
Read about my sequel idea in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 