Now with the cutest Dino Puppies
Meg 2: The Trench (2023): 9 out of 10: I do not have the kind of ego that expects the producers of Meg 2: The Trench to have read my positive review of The Meg, taken my advice to heart, and built an entire sequel around my biggest complaint.
That said, I was hardly the only person to notice that The Meg was a giant shark movie with a suspicious shortage of tourists being munched. For all its pleasures, the first film often seemed oddly reluctant to let the shark loose in the middle of a buffet line. It had a prehistoric murder fish, yes, but it also had the strange restraint of a film that did not want to get too much blood in the swimming area.
Meg 2 corrects this issue. Gloriously. In fact, the last thirty minutes or so of Meg 2 almost rival Humanoids from the Deep in basic monster-movie principle. Now, of course, this is a PG-13 action blockbuster and not an R-rated seaside exploitation film, so there is far less gore, far less nudity, disappointingly less child murder and thankfully far less rape. But structurally, the two films understand the same essential truth: eventually the monsters need to reach the beach and start thinning the crowd. And Meg 2 does just that.
This is a surprisingly good film. I have watched it a couple of times now, and I actually enjoyed it more the second time around. The Meg 2 is not smarter than the first film. Nor is not more plausible. It is not even pretending to be in the same room as plausible. But it delivers more of what made The Meg work, and then it adds several extra scoops of nonsense on top.
The Good
The best thing about Meg 2 is that it understands scale. Not a scientific scale, obviously. If you start applying actual marine biology or pressure physics to this movie, the whole thing folds up like a wet napkin. I mean action scale. Monster scale. Escalation scale.
The film starts in the distant prehistoric past for reasons I still do not entirely fathom, showing us dinosaurs, little dog-like dinosaur creatures, and, naturally, a giant Meg. The Meg comes ashore and eats a dinosaur, which is the sort of thing these movies do when they want to tell you that your old movie monster is yesterday’s news. It reminded me of Orca having a killer whale take out a great white shark, or Jurassic World feeding a great white to the mosasaurus. It is the monster movie equivalent of saying, “You thought that was bad? Watch this.”
Is it necessary? Not really. Is it ridiculous? Absolutely. Does it set the tone? More or less.
Meg 2 is also much better looking than it has any real obligation to be. This is a beautifully shot giant shark sequel, which is not a phrase I expected to write, but here we are. The underwater material could have turned into murky CGI mush, but much of it has a clean, handsome, pulpy adventure look. It is not just a shark movie. It is a secret underwater base movie, an illegal mining operation movie, a survival trek movie, a Jason Statham punches people movie, and eventually a monster beach party movie.
Speaking of Statham, the film wisely gives him an early excuse to beat up people and do a bit of parkour, as if he were briefly auditioning for a Steven Seagal movie made by someone with better cardiovascular health. Considering that much of the rest of the film involves him being chased by sharks, octopuses, and assorted prehistoric leftovers, it is nice to be reminded that he can still handle the traditional action-star business of knocking villains around.
The middle section is also stronger than expected. The walk from the disabled subs to the illegal mining operation under the sea has a real Pitch Black feeling to it. Not in plot, exactly, but in the sense of a dangerous crossing between two unsafe places, with the characters exposed, vulnerable, and moving through an environment that very much wants them dead. That sequence has real tension, and it gives the film a better adventure spine than it probably needed.
There is also a terrific surprise-death moment that plays like the famous Samuel L. Jackson scene in Deep Blue Sea. I will not spoil it in detail, because it is one of the cleaner pleasures of the movie, but it lands. It is one of those moments where the film briefly remembers that surprise is a weapon, and it uses that weapon properly.
And then there is the finale.
The finale is why the movie exists. This is where Meg 2 finally does what the first film was too timid to do. We get vacationers, predators, chaos, running, screaming, and several kinds of large aquatic bad news arriving at once. There are Megs. There are smaller prehistoric critters. There is an octopus. There are people who richly deserve to become seafood-adjacent casualties. It is absurd, crowded, shameless, and exactly the sort of thing a sequel like this should be doing.
The comic relief is also decent. I tend to pick on comic relief in movies like this because it so often feels as if the filmmakers have mistaken shouting for comedy and cowardice for character development. Here, it is not exactly hilarious, but it is not a negative. That counts as a win.
The Bad
The big problem with Meg 2 is the same problem that made parts of The Meg a little silly: these creatures are simply too large for some of the things the movie wants them to do.
A bull shark in five feet of water? Fine. Terrifying. A seventy-foot prehistoric shark sneaking around in shallow resort water like it is a ninja with gills? That is a harder sell.
The movie wants the Megs to be deep-sea monsters, open-ocean monsters, shallow-water threats, beach attackers, and basically whatever else the current set piece requires. I am not demanding a documentary here. This is a movie where Jason Statham fights extinct sharks. But even by giant monster standards, there are moments where the geography and creature logistics become distractingly silly.
Then there is the 25,000 feet below sea level free dive. Jason Statham survives this free dive in the titular trench 25k feet below sea level by releasing all the oxygen out of his lungs and sinuses. The film says this with the confidence of a man explaining how to parallel park.
This is roughly the same level of screenwriting science as Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning having Tom Cruise free dives up from a sunken submarine to the Arctic ice. I appreciate that both Statham and Cruise are in excellent shape for their age. I also appreciate that in real life both of these gentlemen would be extremely dead.
The child in distress material is also a bit meh. It is functional, but it is not especially interesting. (It’s Shuya Sophia Cai who is the same little girl from The Meg. She has basically graduated to Damsel in Distress.) The movie tries to use her to raise the stakes, but the emotional material is nowhere near as interesting as the monster mayhem or the undersea adventure mechanics.
More disappointing is Statham riding around on a jet ski trying to kill three Megs with handmade exploding spears. On paper, that should be magnificent. In execution, it is a little confusing to look at and not nearly as entertaining as everything else happening during the finale. When the surrounding material includes prehistoric creatures attacking tourists and an octopus dispensing rough justice, a man-on-jet-ski shark hunt should not be the least interesting part of the climax.
But somehow it is.
The Ugly
The ugly is mostly the science, and there is a lot of it. The film’s relationship with biology, pressure, evolution, diving, and basic spatial reasoning is not adversarial so much as imaginary. Meg 2 does not bend science. It smiles politely, walks around science, and then rides a jet ski into a shark’s face.
The prehistoric opening is a good example. It technically sets up later creatures, but it also feels like the movie clearing its throat with a sequence from a different, dumber dinosaur picture. The Meg eating the dinosaur is certainly a statement, but I am not sure it is a statement the movie needed to make. We have already bought the ticket. We know the big shark is big. (Though points for getting the geological period correct with Cretaceous… Looking your way, Jurassic Park)
There is also the tonal oddness of a movie that sometimes wants to be a deep-sea science-fiction thriller and sometimes wants to be a full-tilt beach monster jamboree. Fortunately, the film is lively enough that the tonal shifts are more amusing than damaging, but it is not a seamless ride. It lurches from corporate villainy to underwater survival to monster chaos with the grace of a shark trying to use a revolving door.
Still, for a film like this, ugly is not necessarily fatal. In fact, some of the ugly is part of the charm. This is a sequel that solves many problems by adding another monster. Giant shark not enough? Add more giant sharks. Still not enough? Add weird little prehistoric dog like creatures. Still not enough? Add a giant octopus. At some point, criticism gives way to respect. The film knows what business it is in.
In Conclusion
Meg 2: The Trench is not a good movie by traditional standards. But it knows what it is and it does that very well indeed.
Meg 2 is a very satisfying sequel to The Meg. It takes one of the first film’s biggest weaknesses (the lack of large-scale tourist-munching chaos) and fixes it with enthusiasm. It is bigger, sillier, somehow even less plausible, and is more fun.
It has some actual strengths. It looks better than expected. The underwater trek has genuine tension. Jason Statham gets to do both action-star punching and giant-shark nonsense. The surprise death lands. The comic relief does not sink the picture. And the final act finally gives us the monster-on-vacation carnage that this franchise should have been delivering all along.
It also has some very real weaknesses. The science is nonsense, the shallow-water shark logistics remain suspect, the child/damsel in danger material is routine (to old to be a kid to young to be a damsel), and the climactic jet-ski spear-fishing is not as thrilling as it should be.
But I cannot pretend I did not have a good time. Meg 2 is ridiculous in mostly the right ways. It is the rare sequel that hears the complaint “more people should be eaten by giant sea monsters” and responds, “Fair enough.”
