Wouldn’t it be something if a silly sharksploitation movie had a real budget? Then again, maybe not.

Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is back — four years after coming out of retirement to defeat a prehistoric shark — but this time he’s a James Bond-like eco-activist risking his life to unmask rogue ships dumping toxic waste at sea! No, wait: he’s still working with those sealab fools who keep poking at the Mariana Trench below the frost barrier and pretending nothing can go wrong. When Jonas and co. discover more bad guys have found a new way to exploit the ocean floor, they’ll have to avoid not one but three megalodons to save the day. Yay! Then finally they can go after the giant prehistoric sharks attacking a nearby… wait, didn’t we watch this already?

Any Jason Statham fan or shark-movie completionist will get their money’s worth out of this sequel to The Meg; if that’s you, stop here and enjoy! Any fan of author Steve Alten who’s read the 1999 novel The Trench: Meg 2, however, might be more than a little confused. Director Ben Wheatley takes on a script from the screenplay writers of the first film, but there’s a big question as to how much was included by the time it went to the editing room and through post production. There seems to be more of everything: more dive tech, more complications, more human baddies, and more sea monster mayhem. The Meg book series has quite a few entries and supporters; wouldn’t the producers want these films to do as well as possible and keep them going?

Our new story begins 65 million years ago… at least 40 million years earlier than megalodon was believed to exist. The Trench is as if The Meg were merged with the stock plot of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park hoping most folks probably wouldn’t notice. After all, Alten’s novel series was dubbed “Jurassic Shark,” and the sequel novel sort of goes in that direction. For three seventy-foot-long giant sharks, however, their size appears to change from scene to scene, sometimes small enough to navigate the shallows between two docked houseboats before suddenly having jaws big enough to eat either houseboat whole. Editors must not have had enough time to correct the work of whomever they outsourced the added-in CG dolphin sequences to; add in the mysteriously appearing/disappearing harpoon bombs strapped to Statham’s back, and it all looks like the final cut was seriously rushed to completion.

Shuya Sophia Cai is back as Meiying (the same little girl from the first film), as are Cliff Curtis as Mac, Page Kennedy as “the new and improved” DJ, and Sienna Guillory as Driscoli — oh, and the adorable Yorkie, too. It’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys: with exception of Statham, the good ones look constantly surprised to be alive while the bad ones all look like they can scowl themselves into success. It’s weird how different the first hour goes, looking heavily borrowed from the Kristen Stewart thriller Underwater, a surprisingly suspenseful ocean-floor epic. With so much world-building and tech-savvy save-the-oceans maritime stuff heaped into the first hour, it feels like filmmakers gave up on any second hour plot details to start the frantic swimming and screaming; hey, it worked in the first movie, right?

Yes, it sets up another sequel; at least that part they kept from the novel. The first Meg movie made most of its money overseas, pulling in over half a billion dollars worldwide by releasing on about the same weekend in 2018 pre-Covid. Appearing in fewer domestic theaters thanks to the continuing endurance of #Barbenheimer, The Trench will need that overseas push to earn a third film. Then again, enthusiasts can rewatch all the Sharknado films and other sharksploitation on streaming venues and be just as entertained, but seriously: if you’re craving pulse-pounding what-the-hell-is-that sea-floor shenanigans, go watch Underwater.

Meg 2: The Trench is rated PG-13 for action/violence, some bloody images, language, brief suggestive material, and still not an R-rated cut. C’mon guys!

Two skull recommendation out of four

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