“Back for seconds” is the tagline on Meg 2: The Trench, and it is the rare promise a sequel keeps without meaning to. Ben Wheatley’s film runs 116 minutes and returns Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor, the deep-sea diver who survived a megalodon in 2018’s The Meg. This time he brings a bigger shark, a smaller script, and a mining conspiracy that stalls the movie whenever the fish leave the frame.
Meg 2: The Trench premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival on June 9, 2023, and Warner Bros. Pictures released it in the United States on August 4. It grossed $397.8 million worldwide. It also holds a Metacritic score of 40 out of 100. Both numbers are true, and only one of them describes what it is like to sit through the thing.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Jonas Taylor and the Trench
The plot picks up five years after the first film. Jonas now fights environmental crimes while helping Mana One explore the Mariana Trench. His wife Suyin Zhang has died. He raises her teenage daughter Meiying alongside her uncle, Jiuming Zhang, played by Wu Jing.
Jiuming trained an 80-foot female Meg named Haiqi, discovered as a pup and kept in a reserve in Hainan. Haiqi escapes captivity the night before a routine submersible dive. She follows the subs down through the thermocline and forces her way past it. Below, she meets two larger Megs, an alpha male and a beta male, and mates with them.
Jiuming works out what the audience already guessed: it is mating season. Haiqi was calling the others. This is the film’s best idea, and the movie spends its goodwill on banter before it gets there.
Montes, Driscoll, and the Illegal Mining Operation
Deeper still, the team finds an illegal mining operation run by a mercenary named Montes, played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta. Montes holds a vendetta against Jonas for his imprisonment some time before. His crew was hired by the corrupt billionaire Hillary Driscoll, played by Sienna Guillory, to use Mana One’s access to the Trench to mine rare-earth minerals worth billions.
Montes kills his own crew in an explosion to cover the operation. The blast ruptures the Trench and grounds the team’s ships. Back on Mana One, engineer DJ, operations manager Mac, and analyst Jess find the rescue pod has been sabotaged. The survivors must walk toward Montes’ station in exosuits. The film’s running order is roughly this:
| Reel | What happens | Who carries it |
|---|---|---|
| One | Mana One dive; Haiqi escapes | Jonas, Jiuming |
| Two | Descent through the thermocline | Jonas, Jiuming, Meiying |
| Three | The mating Megs | Haiqi, alpha male, beta male |
| Four | Mining operation exposed | Montes, Driscoll |
| Five | Exosuit walk; surface chaos | DJ, Mac, Jess |
That is a serviceable skeleton. Wheatley, working from a script by Dean Georgaris and the brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber, does not trust it. Every stretch of quiet gets a joke, and every joke gets a second one behind it.
What the Cast Is Asked to Do
Statham does what Statham does. He swims, he punches, he delivers a line about being back for seconds without appearing to enjoy it. Wu Jing is the more interesting presence, and the film gives him the closest thing to a character arc: a man who trained a predator and then watched it leave.
Cliff Curtis returns as Mac and Page Kennedy returns as DJ, both from the first film. Sophia Cai returns as Meiying. Skyler Samuels plays Jess, Melissanthi Mahut plays security officer Rigas, and Whoopie van Raam, Kiran Sonia Sawar, and Felix Mayr play divers Curtis, Sal, and Lance. Most of them are given one trait and a wet suit.
The comparison to the 2018 original is not flattering. The Meg was a B-movie that knew it. Meg 2: The Trench wants to be a conspiracy thriller with sharks in it, and the conspiracy is the part nobody came for.
| The Meg (2018) | Meg 2: The Trench (2023) | |
|---|---|---|
| Director | Not named in the source | Ben Wheatley |
| Source | Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror | Alten’s 1999 novel The Trench |
| Statham’s role | Jonas Taylor | Jonas Taylor |
| Antagonist | The Meg | Montes and Driscoll |
| Runtime | Shorter | 116 minutes |
A Sequel That Forgets the Shark
Here is the part worth saying plainly. Meg 2: The Trench is not a disaster. It is a waste. The megalodons are the reason anyone buys a ticket, and the film keeps them offscreen while Montes explains a mining scheme. The exosuit walk is a stretch of dead air dressed as suspense.
The movie’s own genre tags — action, science fiction, horror — describe three films, and it commits to none. The horror never lands because the sharks are too often rendered as a shape in murk. The science fiction never lands because the Trench is a hallway. The action lands only when Statham is allowed to be a man in the water with something enormous.
The $397.8 million gross says the audience showed up anyway. That is a fact about the franchise, not about this film. A sequel can sell tickets and still squander the one thing it had: a monster, and a reason to fear it.
Plans for this film were in early development by October 2018, after the first one made money. Photography ran from February to May 2022 across Asia and at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden. That is a lot of machinery pointed at a movie that cannot decide what it is.
Meg 2: The Trench is streaming-adjacent entertainment with a theatrical budget and no nerve. See it for Statham, for Wu Jing, or for the 80-foot Haiqi. Do not see it for the Trench.
4 of 10.
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