During an underwater reconnaissance mission, Jonas’ (Jason Statham) submersible is attacked by a rouge megalodon.  To escape, he pilots the craft below the thermocline only to discover more megalodons, and even more dangerous than that, a robust, black-market mining operation.  After making a daring escape back to the surface to Mana 1, he and his crew discover the research station had been infiltrated.  With dwindling options for survival, they again make an escape to a nearby island resort, but the mercenaries, megalodons, and a whole host of prehistoric creatures that followed them through the breach of the thermocline are in hot pursuit of their little lifeboat, and soon the entire island is in danger. 

Ben Wheatley takes over the director’s seat from Jon Turteltaub with Meg 2: The Trench, 2023’s summer-time shark feature from Warner Brothers.  Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, and Dean Georgaris all return to help pen the 116-minute-long sequel that, while only 3 minutes longer than its predecessor, The Meg (2018), greatly increases the scope and scale of the already comically large concept. 

Statham continues to pad his resume as a gruff action hero by reprising his role as Jonas.  These kinds of films always require some degree of suspension of disbelief on behalf of the audience, and so it is expected that Jonas will find himself in many impossible situations of which he escapes with nary more than a scratch and just in the nick of time.  For the most part, the film stays at the same level of unnatural ability, except for one scene where – even if the physics behind the scene does allow for it – Jonas fills his sinus cavities with water so that he does not implode when free-swimming at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.  The leadup involves not one, but two instances where Rigas (Melissanthi Mahut) explains the science of it all to Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai), Jonas’ 14-year-old stepdaughter who stowed away on the doomed submersible, but it just becomes way too much for audiences to stay invested into the film.  While thankfully not as gross as the impromptu legal lesson in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), it is still a poor bit of exposition and coming in at around the middle mark of an already bloated and overcomplicated second act, Meg 2 needs to keep its audiences on the hook for as long as possible and these cracks in the immersion work against that goal. 

While the megalodon family does pose a threat during the second act when the crew is trapped in the underwater mining facility, the real threat resides back at Mana 1 as Mac (Cliff Curtis) and DJ (Page Kennedy) investigate who is the mole that has betrayed the entire operation.  It is quickly revealed to be Jess (Skyler Samuels) as the mole, working for Driscoli (Sienna Guillory), a chief financer of the entire research operation.  Together, the pair form a parody of a Bond villain going through the motions as they snap commands at their nameless goons but they never really have any development on their own.  Ultimately, Meg 2 is not looking to be a spy thriller despite having the perfect DNA for one in its opening gambit, but that it contains so many elements of one that are never truly developed it makes this first hour a true slog to get through.  Audiences are here to see some man vs shark antics, and if the script is going to largely deny them of that, then the human antagonists need to be strong enough to pick up that slack, and in this case, they are not.  The narrative, then, while simple to follow, feels overcomplicated because so many elements are introduced and then all-too-quickly resolved keeping the action we came for at arm’s reach with narrative filler. 

Once the crew makes their way to Fun Island, Meg 2 finally begins to fulfill its marketing promise and the energy of the film finds the adrenaline it needs to wake audiences up from the drama of the first half.  Haris Zambarloukos’ camera and Jonathan Amos’ editing style still favor quick and frantic cuts to help hide the edges of the effects, but it makes much of the action indistinguishable.  There are still moments in the last act that can inspire some excitement, but strangely enough, it is the land-based set pieces that are most effective.  Even though the core cast had been established by this point so we know they will survive more or less unscathed, the action is much more enjoyable as we can finally see the cast since they are not in their deep-sea dive suits and Jonas et. al. are finally able to confront the human antagonists face to face, in conjunction with contending against the megalodons.  Everything has come together and while the film still runs entirely too long, it at least ends on a more enjoyable note. 

Meg 2 is a strange film held back by many of the traps that it laid out for the characters but fell victim to itself.  It tries to elicit some sense of emotional danger through Meiying, but her character really just holds the action back from being as bold and brutal as it wants to be.  It tries to be more than just a fun summer shark flick by adding in this convoluted plot about underwater mining that really goes nowhere once the crew returns to Mana 1.  In its effort to expand on what came before it – and, to be fair, The Meg also had higher aspirations for itself – it becomes a wild mess that is unable to be reared back in by Wheatly into a simpler and more synthesized story. Given that so much of the dialogue seems to have been added and delivered through ADR, it seems very possible that the film went to shoot on a draft and that Wheatly did not have anything close to a finished script until the film was being cut.  Meg 2 is somewhere in the middle of being too little of what it set up and not enough of what it should be, so the final result is a misfire on almost all fronts that tries the patience of its audience more than inspiring thrills.