116 min | PG-13 | August 4, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Jonas Taylor dives back into the trench, where sharks the size of buildings have waited millions of years for a meal this stupid. The movie promises Jason Statham versus a megalodon. It spends an hour making you wait and forgets why you came.
Jonas Taylor returns to the deepest trench in the ocean. Down there, prehistoric sharks the size of buildings wait for the first thing dumb enough to descend. The film promises Jason Statham fighting a megalodon. It delivers that for a few minutes and pads the rest with corporate sabotage, an illegal mining operation, and a submarine breakdown nobody asks to watch. The real subject is a studio stretching one good idea across a feature it cannot fill.
Jason Statham plays Jonas Taylor with the same clenched competence he brings to every role. He glares, he dives, he stabs a shark with a spear, and he never once suggests the character has an interior. Wu Jing plays Jiuming Zhang, a marine engineer who exists to deliver exposition and stand next to Statham. Shuya Sophia Cai plays Meiying, the teenager who keeps wandering into danger to manufacture stakes. Page Kennedy plays DJ for comic relief that lands once. Cliff Curtis plays Mac and Sergio Peris-Mencheta plays Montes, the mercenary villain, and both stand stranded in a script that gives them nothing to act.
Ben Wheatley directs this. The man who made Kill List and Sightseers brings none of his menace or wit to the material. The script by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, and Dean Georgaris, adapted from Steve Alten’s novel, front-loads an hour of underwater procedure before any teeth arrive. The underwater photography drowns everything in murky teal and renders the megalodons as gray smears that the editing cuts away from before you register their scale. The third act finally reaches a beach resort and stages the carnage in bright daylight, which is the only stretch where the film knows what it is.
The pieces of a fun creature feature exist here. Statham against a megalodon is a premise that sells itself. The film keeps that promise locked in a box while it processes plot no one came to see. Wheatley is a strange choice for this, and the movie buries every instinct that makes him interesting. What remains is a generic blockbuster wearing the mask of a B-movie, too expensive to be trashy and too dull to be fun.