BEFORE: I'm back again to ruin your last good beach weekend for the summer. You're welcome. My wife is currently re-watching all of "Survivor", she stopped watching at some point around season 30, but I kept going, just made it part of my weekly routine. Anyway, she said there was a Survivor "quiz" in one of the episodes about the best way to avoid a shark attack, most of the contestants chose answer "A" which was "punch the shark in the nose", and totally missed the CORRECT answer, which was "D" - "don't go in the water". Really, it's the only safe move, I know you love the beach and you're a great swimmer, but please, please stay safe out there.
If you're like me and you don't go to the beach (for reasons I've described here before at length, so there's no reason to get into them again) then a three-day weekend is a terrible thing - you can fly somewhere, but thousands of other people are doing that too, so good luck with that. You can go on a road-trip, but same problem, tons of traffic on Friday night or Saturday morning and even more on Monday night, because everybody gots to get home at the same time. So unless you know some less-traveled out-of-the-way fun thing to do somewhere, and a secret way to get there, here's how your three-day weekend's going to go. Day 1, sleep late and sit around the house, maybe watch a movie but feel guilty about the fact that you're not accomplishing anything or going out to do anything fun. Day 2, maybe a couple loads of laundry, if you're into it maybe a nice dinner out or more likely, take-out from that place you rarely order from. Day 3, forget it, you have to work tomorrow so you can't go anywhere or stay up late because you need to be back at your desk early Tuesday morning. Look, it's going to go by very quickly, so just relax and try to enjoy it if you can. Hey, that's a metaphor for life, really, it's going to go by very quickly so just relax and try to enjoy it if you can.
That's my plan, I've got three more Jason Statham films to watch, and so he's my Labor Day action hero, carrying over again from "The Meg" along with three other survivors - I mean, actors. I've got Tuesday off as well, so it's really a four-day weekend, maybe we'll go out for dinner tonight or tomorrow, or just order take-out from that place we rarely order from. Maybe I can start another TV series, now that I finished "What If?" and "Pennyworth" - I heard there's a new season of "Only Murders in the Building", I could start on that, and then there's "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", it's still only 20 episodes, maybe I could knock that out.
Here's the format breakdown for August, September linking will be due tomorrow:
7 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Year of the Dog, The Last Vermeer, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Beau Is Afraid, C'mon C'mon, 13, Expend4bles
7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Square, The Rover, High Life, Good Time, The Meg, Meg 2: The Trench
6 watched on Netflix: Call Me Kate, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire, Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver, The Son, Good Grief, Pieces of a Woman
1 watched on Amazon Prime: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
1 watched on Hulu: Next Goal Wins
1 watched on Hulu: Next Goal Wins
1 watched on Peacock: Armageddon Time
2 watched on Tubi: Famous Nathan, Her Smell
1 watched in theaters: Deadpool & Wolverine
1 watched on a random site: Napoleon
1 watched on a random site: Napoleon
27 TOTAL
THE PLOT: A research team encounters multiple threats while exploring the depths of the ocean, including a malevolent mining operation.
AFTER: There's kind of a reason Jason Statham got to shine in these "Meg" movies, he was a competitive diver in the past, according to IMDB he was in the Olympic trials in 1985 and also represented England in something called the Commonwealth Games. I guess it's helpful here to have an actor so familiar with swimming and diving and maybe scuba diving as well. I mean, I'm sure there are stuntmen and they didn't let him do anything totally dangerous, but still, some knowledge of how to do certain things was probably a plus.
The film starts off in prehistoric times, where there are these early pre-evolution things that aren't sharks, they're more like crocodiles, but here come the "Jurassic Shark" comparisons again. If you're impressed by the awesome power of a T. Rex, just wait, because it's not the biggest predator that was around back then, just wait until you see what happens when that dinosaur stands just a little too close to the ocean. He also should have learned the lesson about staying away from the beach.
Evolution is a funny thing, because horses used to be really small and apparently sharks used to be gigantic - so they kind of switched places over the years, and dinosaurs became birds somehow but prehistoric crocodiles stayed more or less the same. I don't know, it's got something to do with the ice caps melting and the oceans receding and the land being more important than the water, plus maybe diet and exercise over a few epochs, who can say?
But if there's one thing that humans should have learned from the last few years, it's to not trust any evil billionaires who fund things like space exploration or in this case, deep-sea exploration. I say even more, don't trust people who SAY they're billionaires but are really only millionaires - they know who they are, but if they're lying about THAT, then they're also lying about protecting abortion rights and fighting inflation and tax cuts for the middle class. Just saying. The new billionaire funding the deep-sea exploration here also has a second team of miners in the trench, who are plundering the rare earth minerals from the sea floor because they can be used in semi-conductors and such, billions of dollars in profit, and absolutely no repercussions because nobody can see what they're doing. The big twist here is that the new evil billionaire is a woman, so congrats on breaking that glass ceiling, I guess?
So the team of oceanographers not only has to worry about giant sharks and giant squids and the other things in the trench that want to kill them, but also the mercenary miners and the miners' boss who is also THEIR BOSS, who allows them to all get stuck in the bottom of the ocean. Really, they should have read their employment contracts more closely, because somehow they authorized this when they took the job, so next lesson, always read the fine print. But thank God they've got Jonas Taylor on their side, he's back on the case after a few years spent with the woman he met in the last film, and becoming a father figure to her daughter, who keeps insisting on putting herself in jeopardy and going on missions with him. This equates to more of the "tempting fate" equation, as in, I've got my step-daughter with me on a dangerous deep-sea mission, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
That's really the mantra for the whole film, as in "we've got a Megalodon shark kept in a tank, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?" or "we're going back down into the Marianas trench, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?" or "we're mining the sea floor surrounded by giant sharks, what could..." well, you get the idea. A lot goes wrong, and Jonas Taylor and his crew have to fix it all, with the help of explosive harpoons and underwater suits and very few. guns, can they defeat the evil mercenaries AND the mega-sharks AND the giant octopus and save the beach resort of Fun-Fun Island? We just love to see billionaires and bratty tourists get eaten, don't we, folks?
Effects-wise, there are a few nods to the "Indiana Jones" franchise, like there's the fight on the mining conveyor belt, which calls to mind "The Temple of Doom", and the run across the pier as it's collapsing seems a bit like the rope bridge bit from that same movie, making this film kind of. a synthesis of "Jaws" and "Indiana Jones", which of course would be "Raiders of the Lost Shark". But not really. And by the way, totally different ending from the last film, where Jonas has to kill a giant shark with a submersible and a harpoon - here he uses a jet-ski and a helicopter blade. See, totally different!
One point off for the "song" that runs during the closing credits, performed by one of the actors, and it's not just the worst rap song, but the single worst song I've ever heard in my life. Sample lyrics - "chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp". WTF? That alone should be enough to veto a third film in this series, however this film did well at the box office last summer, so yeah, there's probably another one on the way.
Also starring Sophia Cai, Cliff Curtis, Page Kennedy (all three carrying over from "The Meg"), Wu Jing, Sergio-Peris Mencheta (last seen in "Life Itself"), Skyler Samuels (last heard in "Furry Vengeance"), Melissanthi Mahut (last seen in "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"), Whoopie Van Raam, Kiran Sonia Sawar, Felix Mayr, Sienna Guillory (last seen in "Clifford the Big Red Dog"), Robin Hill, Ivy Tsui (also carrying over from "The Meg"), Stewart Alexander (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Cai Jingjing, Matthew Stirling, Billy Clements (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Jonny James (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), and the voice of Sara Dee.
RATING: 5 out of 10 bags of ammonium nitrate
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