As a staunch shark movie fan, Meg 2: The Trench was one of the new movies released in 2023 that I expected to enjoy when I sat down to watch it. But where the first film was an enjoyable, silly summer action flick, this creature feature follow-up gets progressively bigger and badder across its two-hour runtime.
Meg 2: The Trench attempts to up the ante from the franchise’s first entry. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) and his surviving colleagues and the new head of China’s Oceanic Institute, Jiuming (Jing Wu), end up facing an additional foe as three megs hit the water this time around.
The Mana One research station is now funded by another uber-rich CEO, Hillary Driscoll, who has predictably shady motives for taking over as a benefactor. The Oceanic Institute has also been keeping a young meg in captivity to study its behavior (though, Haiqi the megalodon quickly escapes her enclosure).
Soon, we join the crew on an excursion below the thermocline layer of the ocean, where they’re mapping out another part of the titular trench. Down in the depths, they discover a secret underwater operation drilling into the trench to extract rare earth minerals.
A brief encounter with the deep-sea drillers sets off a chain of explosions that rips a hole in the thermocline, allowing the giant sharks (and some other terrors from the deep) to slip through along with them, leading to a race against time to save the surface world from three menacing megalodons.
If that plot summary felt like it described two different movies, that’s what the Meg 2 viewing experience is like. That first half culminates in a murky, survival-horror trek set way below the surface, as the crew flees their submersibles and is forced to stomp across the seafloor to take refuge in the illicit underwater base. The perilous walk across “The Trench” presents some impressive visuals from the otherworldly world below the waves and some unnerving shots of unfamiliar flora and fauna, and throws in some off-screen disappearances to keep the tension up.
Sadly, this same section is also a vehicle for a deflating underwater chase into the seafloor base, where the crew is more under threat by the other creatures of the deep and monologuing, one-note human villains, with the giant sharks mostly left in the background as looming but lesser threats.
Things are flipped on their head when the crew returns to the surface for a third act that takes place on, no joke, “Fun Island”. There, the film serves up a glut of overblown action that brings Meg 2: The Trench back in line with the tone set by the opening scene in which a T-Rex is gobbled up by a megalodon.
The entire third act is popcorn cinema through and through, driven by relentless action and carnage as Jonas takes on the rampaging megs, but it’s bogged down by its messy execution, plagued by rough visuals, editing slip-ups, sloppy fight choreography, poorly-written dialogue, and too many riffs and references that point to — or are directly lifted from — other, better movies. It also doesn’t help that the carnage is undercut by the film’s PG-13/12A rating, as this limits the gore and stops the action from having an impact on-screen.
It’s even more frustrating that this second half features hints at a better movie lurking below the waves. Here, Statham (who has otherwise fallen into a by-the-numbers action hero performance) delivers a truly top-class corny quip after punting an adversary into the open jaws of a megalodon and DJ steals his scenes as an engineer who’s tooled up to deal with B-movie threats, and we even get an unorthodox POV shot from inside the mouth of a shark as it chows down on the screaming crowds.
If you’re only looking for the thrills and spills of a big shark blockbuster, I’d wager there’s still enough here to keep you entertained throughout, as there’s still a pervasive sense of fun laced within Meg 2’s DNA, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a turn-your-brain-off movie every now and then.
However, Meg 2: The Trench is a movie plagued with issues, and one that might see the franchise going extinct before the third film that the franchise teases it so clearly wants to make in the movie’s final moments.
Meg 2: The Trench is now in theaters.
