Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ on HBO Max, In Which Jason Statham Rodeos More Giant Sharks

As they say, there’s always a bigger fish, or in this case, another fish, as Jason Statham grabs an explosive harpoon and hops on a jetski to once again stare down a massive megalodon in Meg 2: The Trench (now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video). The movie is a sequel to 2018’s The Meg, a brutally dumb action movie about a giant ancient shark using its giant ancient teeth to chomp shit to death; it was sort of a surprise hit, grossing $530 million worldwide and pretty much guaranteeing this sequel, especially since the films are based on a series of seven (and counting) pulp novels by Steve Alten. Some of the original cast returns alongside Statham, whose camp-action cred is severely tested in these CGI-shark flicks, which vacillate between being watchable dreck and just plain dreck – now let’s see in which of those two pots Meg 2 falls.

MEG 2: THE TRENCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Gotta hand it to Meg 2 for its hilarious title cards – it opens with one reading THE CRETACEOUS, 65 MILLION YEARS AGO, when a T-rex chases a few amphibious dagger-toothed nasties into the shallows and ends up on a megalodon brunch menu – a scene that’s not apropos of nothing, especially when the third act revs up. Then the film cuts to THE PRESENT DAY, during which a bunch of stupid-ass stuff happens for about 70, maybe 80 minutes until we get the following gem: 5KM FROM FUN ISLAND, 70KM FROM THE THERMIC EVENT, and even though that elicits a chuckle, by then, this plot is about 200 million km from us giving a f—. Now, skipping over dull shit is entirely your prerogative, but not mine, because if we movie critics are anything, we’re diligent in our insistence that we take the art of film seriously despite having to watch stuff like this, and that means we have to sit through the boring shit to get to the good shit, and determine if the good shit is actually good or not.

Anyhow. It’s established that Jonas Taylor (Statham) is still a badass, because we see him infiltrate a group of seafaring bad guys so he can stop them from dumping toxic waste into the ocean, a scene that’s pretty much apropos of nothing, other than providing movie watchers an opportunity to endure a mediocre action sequence. Then he returns to Mana One, the research base that’s a couple hundred klicks from the Chinese coast, and has been set up to explore the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, which we learned in the first movie goes deeper than we thought, into a world where beasts long thought extinct are indeed not extinct, e.g., the megalodon, a shark so huge it makes Jaws look like Nemo. 

The guy in charge at Mana One is Jiuming Zhang (Wu Jing), the uncle of the little girl we met in the first movie, Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai), who has since become Jonas’ stepdaughter, while Jonas has since become a widower. A couple of Jonas’ coworker buddies are still present – Mac (Cliff Curtis) and DJ (Page Kennedy), who join the crew for a jaunt down to the hoary deeps to explore some uncharted territory. We also learn that Jonas has a deviated septum, which seems to be the worst injury he procured from the first movie, where he managed to rodeo a breaching megalodon and lance its eyeball with a harpoon. Dude’s lucky he didn’t tear a hangnail!

It’s worth noting that Zhang harbors a megalodon in the Mana One facility, I think in a crate he got on clearance at PetSmart, because it breaks out of there like Jason Statham in paper handcuffs. Don’t worry, though, the shark has a name, Haiqi, and Zhang has been “training” it to not eat him when he clicks a button on a handheld gizmo, which might come in handy later in the movie but hey NO SPOILERS. Zhang and Jonas and some expendables – and Meiying, who stows away for the purpose of easy child-endangerment thrills – pootle around in high-tech subs down in the trench for a bit until things go awry and they end up donning underwater armor and walking a couple miles along the bottom of the ocean, where they discover a “rogue mining operation” that splits this plot wide open, mainly so there are some legit bad guys for the megalodons to eat. I mean, what fun would it be if they just ate a bunch of innocent civilians who didn’t deserve it? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Combine Jaws 3-D, Under Siege, Jurassic Park, Kong: Skull Island and K-Stew Mariana Trench adventure Underwater and you’ll get Meg 2, although the result isn’t as enjoyable as it sounds. 

Performance Worth Watching: Man, Statham can nudge-wink his way through all sorts of campy bilge and acquit himself, but this beyond-the-pale dumbassery outpaces his ability to hard-sell it.

Memorable Dialogue: DJ drops the hard movie reference when he pulls out his .50 caliber pistol: “I even made poison-tipped bullets, just like Jaws 2!”

Sex and Skin: Nah. 

Our Take: Director Ben Wheatley follows his best film, 2021’s In the Earth, with his worst film, Meg 2, although I’m sure it’s by far his biggest-budgeted film, and easily his best-paying one. His smaller-scale thrillers were hit-and-miss but nevertheless generally worked, but this mega-scale China-via-Hollywood endeavor might just be 20,000 leagues out of his league. The scenes set underwater – about half the movie – consist of maddening hackwork, a series of what’s-going-on, where-are-we, why’d-that-happen sequences, shot and edited murky and confusing until a shark appears to reorient our eyes and give us a fresh point of reference. This is when a who-cares betrayal twist turns the movie into a generic actioner spiced with megalodons (and a couple other miscellaneous deep-trench beasties), who function as plot devices when our heroes need a new hurdle to jump, although we’d be hard-pressed to give a single damn about any of it.

Now, not caring can be fun when you’re actively rooting for the villain to chomp-chomp the cast like a teenager working through the entire McDonald’s menu on a dare; when a movie disregards any notion of ethics or good taste and gets to killing its characters in spectacular fashion, it tickles the cockles of our reptile brains. But after another thrice-removed fin-in-the-foreground shot, far too many sub-Segal shootouts and boat chases, and instances of not-velociraptors-but-they-might-as-well-be-velociraptors nipping at vacationers’ heels, you begin to wonder if Meg 2 has a single original move in its arsenal. Wheatley dishes out pedestrian CG FX, frames Statham in a few heroic poses and careens his way to a third act that plays as if the writers saw how people praised the third act in the first movie, so they just rewrote it. At one point, I caught myself wondering, is there a better way to solve these problems?, and if you’re thinking that while watching a movie in which Jason Statham all but puts a 70-foot megalodon in a rear naked choke, all is lost. All is lost, I say. 

Our Call: MegaloD’OH! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.