Let’s lay the cards on the table: when a film’s opening proposition is “Jason Statham fights a giant prehistoric shark—again,” you’d best suspend seriousness at the door. The first movie, that improbable waterlogged delight, understood this bargain: it wore its teeth with a wink, tipping its hat to every Jaws-obsessed twelve-year-old (and the ones lurking in every adult). So, of course, Hollywood—in its infinite wisdom—gives us the sequel, the bigger, dumber, and, oh yes, shoddier Meg 2: The Trench. It’s customary. It’s almost a civic obligation. Haven’t we earned our right to a shit sequel?
But “Meg 2” isn’t simply a victim of the sequel curse, it’s practically flirting with it in broad daylight. Ben Wheatley, a director who once felt like a merry prankster let loose in the cinema funhouse, now finds himself treading water in a kiddie pool of radioactive colors and lukewarm jokes. We’re in the realm of loud, bloated Saturday-morning cartoons—only here, the villains actually wear flesh and CGI-enhanced malice rather than mustaches.
From the first muscle-flexing, water-splattering moments, it’s clear this movie isn’t angling for gravitas—why should it, with Jason Statham on standby, doing more to punch the script to life than the writers ever do? The film launches a parade of oversized sea monsters and stock baddies, all clashing with such cheery abandon you almost expect cutaway shots to child actors eating cereal on the couch. It’s pure camp: a barrage of digital murk, incoherent one-liners, and the kind of plot contortions that make you pine for the narrative integrity of Sharknado 3.
The difference is, there’s a pall of desperation in the air. The first film smirked; this one mugs, mugs, and mugs until your face aches.
Put down the popcorn, grab your 3D glasses, and brace yourself—these are not expedition shots for the Discovery Channel. Tom Stern’s camera tries desperately to bewitch us with aquatic grandeur, but the special effects—call them digital sogginess—keep stumbling over themselves. A tranquil blue is replaced, without warning, by machine-gun edits and pixelated chaos. Eerie ocean depths become shallow puddles of liquid neon. There are flashes of beauty, but the movie is so busy yanking us from spectacle to spectacle that the real marvel becomes how quickly your sense of awe drowns in mediocrity.
And yet—here’s the sorcery of the modern blockbuster—the movie never entirely sinks below the boredom line. Meg 2 moves. It thrashes from trench-dive to monster-mash to jet-ski showdown with admirable, empty-headed confidence. There’s a whiff of old-time serial excitement here: you know exactly what will happen, and you half-enjoy twiddling your thumbs on the rollercoaster between equally disposable set pieces. For all its other sins, you do stay hooked, if only in the same way that you rubberneck at a traffic accident involving a clown car.
Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor (the name itself is straight from a barrel of B-movie bravado!) is the sturdy hunk propping up this collapsing sandcastle. He snarls, leaps, and tough-talks his way through oceans of lazy dialogue, reliably delivering the franchise’s only real charisma. Wu Jing enters the fray, stoic and charming—when the script bothers to use him for anything but ballast.
Forget depth—this is a cast of cardboard cutouts, with the villains drawn from the coloring book of cartoon evil. I found myself wishing, in a moment of near-madness, for one hint of adult complexity, some recognition that even in a popcorn bonanza, you don’t have to feed us pure corn syrup with a sippy straw. Instead, we get dialogue that sounds like it was ad-libbed by a committee of bored lifeguards on a rainy day.
The script, if we can dignify it with that name, is a landfill of half-hearted banter. Zingers flop, exposition drowns, and every now and then you get a line so wooden it’s ready to float past whichever confused fish survived dinner with the Meg. If this screenplay were an oxygen tank, I would have thrown it to the shark myself. You could sense the missed opportunity—like a party where someone forgets to bring the punchline.
But if you came for the action—and you did, or your kids dragged you, or you lost a bet—rest assured, it delivers. It’s pandemonium, a fever dream of jet skis, toothy gurgles, explosions, and gravity-defying heroics. Here lies the film at its most honest: Statham doing aquatic slapstick with a prehistoric shark, martial artistry elevated to Looney Tunes physics. It’s all so overcooked, you can practically hear the film giggling at itself. And sometimes, reader, I did too.
What irks most is how “Meg 2” pilfers from the magic of its predecessor without understanding what made it work: the first film balanced its winks and growls. This one just shrieks “More!” like a toddler hopped up on blue raspberry slushies. The novelty is gone; it’s spectacle for spectacle’s sake, and the only real victim is the audience’s dwindling belief in merriment over mayhem.
This movie is a mess—but what a fast, frequently hilarious, and eminently forgettable mess it is. It doesn’t demand thought; it begs for popcorn (or, better yet, a beverage held high in a plastic cup). You’ll laugh, not always with it, and you might even cheer when Jason Statham outpunches evolutionary history. But the moment you surface from the deep, you’ll wonder: was that really the best ride in the park, or just the brightest colored?
If what you crave is monster mayhem and the warm, empty slap of escapist spectacle—go ahead, sign the waiver and hop back into the water. Just don’t be surprised if you leave remembering the first film more fondly, and this one as its considerably goofier, less graceful, distant cousin. And yes, the Meg gets what’s coming—but it’s the franchise that’s truly circling the drain.
