Director Ben Wheatley serves up a busy but flavourless bouillabaisse of ideas nicked from Jaws, Jurassic Park, Alien and Sharknado, and leaves it to Statham to occasionally raise a droll smile
“A relationship, I think, is like a shark,” says Woody Allen in Annie Hall. “It has to constantly move forward or it dies.” Ditto franchises. A prologue set in the Cretaceous period hints that Meg 2: The Trench will exceed the enjoyably tacky thrills of the 2018 seaborne monster movie by going weirder and wilder – a suspicion encouraged by the presence of Ben Wheatley (Sightseers, A Field in England) as director. In fact, the sequel alternately treads water and splashes around frantically in search of an identity. Never settling on whether he wants his film to be Alien, Jaws, Jurassic Park or Sharknado, Wheatley serves up a bouillabaisse of all four.
Battling a 75ft-long megalodon with an 8ft dorsal fin and five rows of teeth is another sort of formidable, remorseless beast: Jason Statham, who returns as shark-hunter and ocean-defender Jonas Taylor but still hasn’t decided whether to play the role with a cockney accent or an American one. While he’s mulling that over, he commandeers a submersible on a research trip 25,000ft below, only to find the mission gatecrashed by megs and other assorted sea monsters. It’s the multiplicity of threats that scuppers any possible scares: everything from a giant squid and velociraptor-like land-dwelling lizards to a double-crossing entrepreneur and a gang of rogue miners leave the meg playing second fiddle in its own film. Matters have come to a pretty pass when audience and characters alike see an exploding head as little more than a minor setback.
