Another Monster Mash, another batch of animals that want to eat you! My reviews of these movies ended up being a bit longer that I anticipated so I’m going to break them up into multiple posts. Let’s get started with the third entry in a series I have covered before.
Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020)
Deep Blue Sea 3 is the second sequel to the original Deep Blue Sea, which was released all the way back in 1999. The original is a movie that I am still quite fond of and is one of my favorite monster movies I have ever written about. Sadly, the first sequel, Deep Blue Sea 2, which was released straight-to-video in 2018, was mostly boring and failed to recapture the fun of the original film. I can cut the sequel a bit of slack because it didn’t have anywhere near as high of a budget as the original, but there’s still no excuse for how painfully dull the second movie was.
Fortunately, the third movie is a significant improvement over the second and is quite a bit of good cheesy fun. The main character is Dr. Emma Collins, who along with her team is living on an artificial island called Little Happy, where they are studying the effects of climate change on shark mating, or something. It doesn’t really matter, but the movie’s location is one of its strongest points. The man-made island in the middle of nowhere is a great location for a shark movie, cleverly bypassing the issues of why the protagonists can’t just leave or call for help.
It’s also a cool location, period. I haven’t seen a location like this in a movie before, and considering what was probably a pretty low budget it looks very good. It also starts to sink later in the movie after a bunch of explosions, which reminded me of the scene near the end of Casino Royale where James Bond fights a bunch of bad guys in a collapsing building in Venice. It’s like that, but on an entire man-made island and with sharks. Very cool stuff.
Warner Bros.
I won’t lie, the first half or so of this movie is a bit slow. Emma and her cohorts are likable folks but I didn’t particularly care about whatever research they were doing and so for a while you’re just waiting for the sharks to show up. Eventually they do, accompanied by a guy named Richard (who is of course Emma’s ex-boyfriend) and a bunch of shady Australians that turn out to be ruthless mercenaries, let by a bloke named Lucas who is the main (human) villain. Richard and Lucas are tracking the sharks from the second movie (I think), and they even directly reference the events of the previous two movies, which provides a nice bit of connective tissue for the series.
After some conflict between the two groups, Lucas just decides to kill everybody and starts blasting the island apart with some kind of explosive launcher, I don’t know what kind of gun he uses but it’s blue and green and I kept thinking it looked like a Nerf gun. The island starts to sink and the sharks close in. These are also super-intelligent sharks that are very crafty. There are some great kills in this movie, many of which are quite unexpected. The best one happens when Richard decides Lucas has gone too far and jumps off their boat AND DIRECTLY INTO THE GAPING MAW OF A SHARK!! It’s fantastic. There’s another one where one of the protagonists is fighting a bad guy and a shark comes out of nowhere and bites the bad guy’s head clean off! And then Emma kills one of the sharks by smushing it in a trash compactor! Excellent.
Look, Deep Blue Sea 3 is obviously no masterpiece, but it is much more enjoyable than the lackadaisical second film. The movie’s first half is a little slow, but the second half is quite action-packed. There are likable characters, a cool and unique location, and bloody and often unexpected kills. You could do a lot worse for a direct-to-video shark movie that is a sequel to a movie that came out more than 20 years ago.
Meg 2: The Trench (2023)
Here’s another sequel to a movie I wrote about in a previous Monster Mash. Meg 2 is one of those movies that got absolutely dragged over the coals by critics but that I found to be quite enjoyable, although it does take a while to get to the good stuff. Meg 2 was directed by Ben Wheatley, a filmmaker with a strong horror pedigree who cut his teeth with the grisly 2011 indie thriller Kill List and who also directed the 2020 version of Rebecca on Netflix. It wouldn’t surprise me if Meg 2 had a bigger budget than all of Wheatley’s previous films combined, and despite the many flaws of Meg 2 Wheatley is a talented filmmaker, and I will always be in favor of movies in which Jason Statham does battle with enormous prehistoric sharks.
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the plot of Meg 2, because let’s face it, nobody cares that much. While I enjoyed the original movie The Meg back in 2018, I don’t think the world was clamoring for a sequel. But money talks so we got a sequel anyway. Meg 2 is utterly ludicrous, but perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how sedate the first half feels.
For the first hour of this movie there’s relatively little shark action and way too much focus on the extremely boring corporate bad guys. Why are there always boring corporate bad guys in killer animal movies? The dull villains in this movie don’t even have a fun evil plan, like building a space laser. All they want to do is mine valuable rare minerals from the bottom of the ocean and sell them to make money. Boring! Be more creative, bad guys! You’re already rich, you don’t need more money! Take a hint from James Bond villains and use your ill-gotten gains to build a freakin’ space laser, sheesh! (What I am realizing here is that I want more movies to feature space lasers.)
Anyway, the somewhat dull first hour is offset when the movie does a nosedive into full-tilt insanity in the last 30 or so minutes. To adapt a phrase from Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan, Meg 2 takes a nosedive out of the crazy tree and hits every branch on the way down for its totally bonkers climax. All the heroes and villains (and creatures) end up at a gorgeous tropical vacation island called Fun Island where all hell breaks loose.
Warner Bros. I like the tagline too.
Here are some of the highlights: Jason Statham zips around on a jet ski skewering megalodons with improvised explosive-tipped harpoons, all while bad guys chase after him shooting at him with machine guns! Heroes and villains alike are attacked by toothy creatures called snappers that are kind of like Gila monsters crossed with velociraptors! Lots of tourists are devoured by giant sharks! Statham kills one of the big sharks by impaling it with one of the rotor blades from a crashed helicopter! He also kills the main human bad guy by kicking him into the maw of one of the sharks and dropping the one-liner “So long, chum!” (GET IT??)
One of the returning characters from the first movie who was mainly comic relief has now become a badass who wields a massive handgun equipped with poison-tipped bullets, and he then fires the gun one-handed whilst flying through the air like something out of a John Woo or Michael Bay movie! And best of all, there is a GIANT OCTOPUS, in other words, a KRAKEN!!! And then there is an all-out KRAKEN/MEGALODON FIGHT!!!
Whew. So yeah, this movie’s last 30 minutes are completely insane in the best possible way. It’s a shame that the rest of the movie doesn’t have the same momentum of the last 30 minutes, if that level of craziness could have been sustained for the entire movie we might have had something truly special on our hands. Despite a thorough critical drubbing, Meg 2 still made nearly $400 million worldwide so it wouldn’t surprise me if Meg 3 rises from the deep in another few years. If so, here’s hoping that the focus will be less on boring illegal mining operations and more on full-bore aquatic monster mayhem since that is clearly where the strength of this franchise rests.
thezombieroom 