Ben Wheatley invests Meg 2 with trenchant satire

Hold onto your floaties, folks, because Meg 2: The Trench is rising up from the depths with a titanic sense of the ridiculous as director Ben Wheatley takes the opportunity to transform this Sino-American exercise in corporate synergy into a post-modern self-aware sharkstravaganza that all but punches its audience in the face with its deliberate absurdity.

Wheatley opens the film with a fun but entirely unnecessary Cretaceous-era scene-setter, which unfolds like a predatory monster matryoshka as each predator is, in turn, gobbled up by something bigger, culminating in Jurassic Park poster-boy the Tyrannosaurus Rex being swallowed whole by a beach-breaching Megalodon. This spectacle smashes us directly into a title sequence set to the strains of Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure—an unfathomably ironic choice given one of the movie’s plot choices later.

The plot itself is a chaotic blend of monster chases and underwater espionage, with leaps of illogic that defy physics and common sense in equal measure. But Wheatley isn’t just ignoring logic; he’s subverting it, crafting a film that knows how ridiculous it is and delights in every absurd twist. He’s got a blockbuster budget to play with and he’s one hundred percent committed to delivering the biggest, best bad shark movie that’s ever been made.

Meg 2: The Trench sees our stalwart hero Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), moonlighting as an independent spy conducting the kind of eco-activism operations Just Stop Oil can only dream about, is recalled to the Mana One oceanographic institute to lead a new expedition into the trench. But their mission is disrupted by an encounter with not one, not two, but three enormous Megalodons along with the discovery of a secret ocean floor mining operation run by Jiuming Zhang’s business partner Hillary Driscoll (Sienna Guillory), who’s looking for a quick return on her sizeable investment.

Jonas is joined by a team of scientists, including Jiuming (Wu Jing), Mac (Cliff Curtis), DJ (Page Kennedy), and the obligatory annoying kid (Sophia Cai, returning as Meiying from the first movie). But this time the threats from the prehistoric predators are compounded by the hilariously over-the-top villainy of Driscoll’s henchman, the cartoonishly evil Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta). Wheatley seems to revel in turning the corporate greed trope up to eleven, inviting us to laugh at the sheer audacity of it all.

And Meg 2: The Trench is nothing if not audacious. Picture this: a film which expends considerable expository effort to explain just how dangerous the water pressure is at the bottom of the trench, creating specialized exo-skeleton dive suits to allow its characters to get up to all sorts of shenanigans on the ocean floor only to turn around within half an hour and deliver a scene where it wholeheartedly contradicts itself and has a character (Statham, naturally) free dive his way between airlocks at 25,000 feet below the surface. It’s fine though, because he “equalizes the pressure in his sinus cavity” which kind of makes the horrible crushing death of redshirt sub pilot Curtis (Whoopie Van Raam) which happened just minutes earlier somewhat avoidable?

Wheatley clearly handed his effects team a mandate to embrace the schlock and while the sharks are the undeniable stars, they’re by no means the only denizens of the deep to get in on the fun. The bad guys’ bombs have blown a hole in the thermocline and all the strange, strange creatures are escaping into the ocean and heading for the conveniently nearby beach resort of Fun Island. Meg 2: The Trench takes the sheer implausibility of the creature’s antics and turns it into a virtue. They’re not there to terrify; the megs, the snappers, and even a giant octopus are there for the shock and “aw, come on!” of it all. It’s B-movie imagination brought to life with A-grade special effects, culminating in a spectacular scene where Statham wields a helicopter rotor blade like a Buster Sword to take out the biggest Meg of all.

Meg 2: The Trench never once tries to be a serious thriller. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a junk food binge—a guilty pleasure that’s as enjoyable as it is terrible. Wheatley’s masterstroke here is to create and curate elevated schlock. Suspend your disbelief and embrace the madness. Bad shark movies have never been this well made, and likely never will be again.