The Meg from 2018 was a shark movie that managed to just come out at the right time with the right amount of cheese to make it financially successful. Every few years, the market seems hungry for a new shark movie to make people think about the sub-genre of horror, and it becomes slightly successful with the proper timing. Deep Blue Sea did it. Sharknado did it. The Meg did it. That brief success in the zeitgeist does not always warrant a sequel, however. In fact, it is often advised against because of how often a sequel deters from the charm of the original. Look no further than how the sequels to the best shark movie of all time, Jaws, managed to denigrate the integrity of the brand. Thus we are left with Meg 2: The Trench. We’ve dropped the “the” from the title, and we’ve dropped a lot more in the process.

Pros

• Even more stupid and over-the-top than the original film

• The opening act is very honest about the quality of the film you’ll be watching

• Some of the action sequences don’t look terrible close-up

Cons

• The sharks are background noise

• Dialogue and script is terrible

• Rips off numerous better films to tell its story (The Abyss, Jurassic Park, Jaws etc.)

• So forgettable, I completely forgot I watched this film for a full 24 hours

Plot & Thoughts

The charismatic, incredible, unstoppable, superstar hero from the last Meg movie, Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), is continuing to be a badass after his epic defeat of the gigantic megalodons. I’m being a little facetious in my description because Jonas is an overpowered hero who is never in danger of death, but I digress, as usual. Jonas is almost single-handedly stopping international polluting, evil, meany-men—who just throw drums of toxic waste into the ocean, for some reason—with the help of his various compatriots from the previous film. When he’s not punching polluters, he’s also helping the brilliant and adventurous scientist Jiuming Zhang (Jing Wu) with his studies surrounding megalodons and the Mariana Trench. Jiuming is the brother of Suyin, the love interest from the last film, who died off-screen because she couldn’t come back for the sequel to a dumb shark movie. Her daughter, Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai), however, returns and has matured a few years to be insufferably confident and adventurous. During what is supposed to be a routine dive in a pair of deep-sea submarines, a megalodon that had been kept captive by Jiuming escapes and forces them to dive deep into the trench past the imaginary barrier that keeps all the big, ancient sea creatures from coming to the surface. While down there, a conspiracy is uncovered and things take a strange turn.

The shark-attack movie has to be one of the most common sub-genres in horror. I’m fairly certain a new shark movie is released every day, and that one MUST be released every 24 hours or our universe might implode. The Meg was a by-the-numbers shark-attack horror movie that just happened to have a bigger budget, Jason Statham, and a little self-awareness. Meg 2, however, goes in some strange different directions in the second act.

It rips off many other great sci-fi and horror films and kind of forgets about its sharks for a plot that gets convoluted and ridiculous by the end. When the team gets to the bottom of the ocean, the movie starts on its Abyss plotline with evil humans adding to the dangers, both above and below the surface. In addition, there are all the other creatures swimming around in the trench that eventually escape. Some of which must be the most amphibious and indestructible creatures that ever lived, because they manage to come all the way out of the water and onto land to start the Jurassic Park sequence of the film without exploding from the sudden lack of water pressure. You might think I’m joking about how the different acts of Meg 2 are basically direct rip-offs from other films, but if you ever see it for yourself, I think you’ll understand.

Despite taking “inspiration” from some classic movies, it does not make Meg 2 more exciting or interesting to watch. I am being 100% honest when I say that this movie fell out of my mind completely the day after I watched it. It wasn’t until I got up the following day and looked at the watch history on my TV that all the images and scenes from Meg 2 came rushing back into my mind. I didn’t like the first movie and I remember even less from it, so Meg 2 has that going for it, at least. It tries to up the anti with more nonsense, action, and plot than The Meg. It has a lot of bombastic moments with explosions, dinosaurs, and Jason Statham riding a jet-ski to dodge giant sharks, but it’s a pretty boring experience. I’m not really sure how they could have fixed it either.

It all feels hollow and fake. Even if you try to turn off your brain to just enjoy the stupid, the characters are uninteresting and the dialogue isn’t even bad enough to be funny. Maybe they could have killed a few hero characters to add some stakes. Maybe they could have “jumped the shark” even more with some stupid third-act alien invasion or something to just make it even more ridiculous. I don’t know if it would have made the movie more entertaining, but something is definitely missing here.

TL;DR

Meg 2: The Trench has a more ridiculous plot, more explosions, and rips off more than just Jaws this time around to try to make the experience more exciting. However, I literally forgot I watched this movie because I was so bored by everything that happened. I think that if the same movie was made with less than half the budget, no-name actors, and passionate filmmakers who wanted to just make a dumb shark movie, it would have a bit more charm to make it worth recommending as an entertaining bad movie. Instead, it’s just a vacuous experience. It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen this year, but it’s nowhere close to good.