It’s taken the Meg franchise exactly one and three-quarter films to figure out what people actually want from a Meg film. If the pitch reads “Jason Statham versus a prehistoric shark”, then the product should be as chaotically stupid as possible. Surely, it’s not hard to figure out? Yet 2018’s The Meg was overstuffed with po-faced sequences of Statham’s rescue diver Jonas Taylor, and his interchangeable crew of supporting characters, scooting along the ocean floor in tiny submersibles and pressing buttons on walls.
If you’ve bought into the dream of watching Statham do flips on a jet ski, harpoon sea creatures, and say things like “see you later, chum” – all while dressed like the world’s sexiest, angriest fisherman – be warned, there’s another po-faced hour and a half of tiny submersibles and buttons on walls to wade through first. Meg 2: The Trench is enthusiastically married to the idea that you must eat your vegetables before you get your dessert. But, really, it’s too little, too late.
