Meg 2: The Trench

It's time for an unchanging and arcane creature of violence to emerge from the depths and unleash slightly bloody violence on the modern world. Yes, Jason Statham is back in Meg 2: The Trench, a befuddling sequel to 2018's The Meg.

Sharksploitation is in – or seemingly, has never gone away, as argued in the recently released documentary of the same name. In that potted history of humanity's cinematic conquest of the cartilaginous fish once known as sea dogs, sharks are presented as a black-eyed void into which people can pour their fear of the sea and what might hide there. In Meg 2: The Trench, they're basically just convenient sight gags, swimming around at high speed until called upon to mindlessly chew on pontoon boats, bridges, subs, tourists, mercenaries, scientists, and evil industrialists. The only difference between the sharks of Meg 2 and those of any other z-grade Jaws knockoff is that they're the giant, ancient megalodon: Extinct in the real world for 3.6 million years, in the Meg movie world they've been lurking at the bottom of the ocean under a layer of icy water that keeps them and other nasty creatures of their prehistoric ilk away from the surface and modernity.

That barrier being readily breached in the first film, the sequel requires a more spectacular disaster as rapacious illegal miners blow up the bottom of the ocean for utterly opaque reasons. Well, it's just so that Green James Bond (as his friends call him) Jonas Taylor (Statham at his most disengaged) can be trapped on an abandoned underwater mining base along with his adopted daughter, Meiying (Cai), and her uncle, Jiuming (Chinese action star Wu). Conveniently, Meiying's mother, Suyin (played in the first film by Li Bingbing) has died offscreen, and that's just one of a series of fortunate events – fortunate, that is, to move the script to the next place that screenwriters Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, and Dean Georgaris want to force it. The megs (for there are three of them) turn up just in time to comedically eat something, or joust with Jason Statham on a Jet Ski.

That's the fun stuff. Or rather, the Fun Island stuff, and that is literally the name of the location of the closing hour. At least that segment has the good grace to be absurd in the manner of the lowest-grade sharksploitation movies, the 5-Headed Shark Attacks, House Sharks, Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacres, even your Sharktopus vs. Whalewolfs. Unfortunately, most of the budget seems to have been spent on the first half, a murky slog through the depths of the meg-infested abyssal depths of the titular Trench where the characters are puddle-deep and the villains so cardboard that their biggest danger isn't being chum but dissolving in water.

What's all most astounding about this is that it's directed with zero panache by Ben Wheatley of all people. The British master of gritty nightmares (Down Terrace, Kill List) and psychedelic mind benders (A Field in England, In the Earth) seemed an unlikely choice to head up a dopey big-budget monster flick. Once the action hits Fun Island, at least he is able to embrace the stupidity, even if he can't overcome either the miserable script or the demands of the Chinese market (Meg 2 having all the narrative hallmarks of a production engineered to comply with the extensive and very real rule book for release in China). But after an hour of a bored Jason Statham trudging across the ocean floor, those laughs could barely raise a bubble in a bathtub.