When I saw the trailer for Meg 2: The Trench and Jason Statham used his legs to hold off one of the megalodons, I knew what kind of movie this was going to be. Sadly, the reality of Meg 2: The Trench did not reach that expectation.

In one of the worst movies of 2023 so far, this sequel truly is filled with nonsensical decisions, both on screen and behind the camera.

Jason Statham is back, now as a environmental warrior, trying to keep the oceans clean while the group he is tied with continues to investigate the Trench, the place where the prehistoric sharks live. When they headed down into the Trench on a mission to explore a section, they come across a giant megalodon and also discover an undersea base that they had no idea was there.

After an explosion set off by one of the film’s nondescript villains traps them under a landslide, the crew has to walk across the ocean floor to the station, hoping to avoid the Megs and other ocean faring monsters. This sequence is just horrible. It is hard to see a lot of what happens and it did not look like they were underwater at all.

Let’s talk about the positives of this movie….

Um…

Well…

It was mostly in focus.

To be fair, some of the film looked pretty good. It was not the greatest CGI I have ever seen, but it was not the worst either. There were some pretty apparent green screen scenes though.

The last 20 minutes or so had a fairly cheesy shark battle, which is what the whole film should have been about. Yes, the ending sequence in the third act was cheesy in nature, and some of the actors involved seemed to know that was what the film was, but some of the things that happened were so dumb and impossible that even for this type of a film, it was too much.

I will say that the scene with Jason Statham’s super strong legs did look a little better in context as there were some chains involved that I did not see in the trailer, so it is not completely inane.

However, what there was not too much of in Meg 2 was sharks. The first two acts of this film had a minimal amount of Megs in a Meg movie. There really was much more of plot involving the human characters and the espionage and betrayal of said human characters. The villains in the movie so just so cardboard cutout that they created zero tension or conflict. I think one of the villains (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) may have actually twirled his mustache once.

The dialogue of Meg 2 was terrible. Nobody talks like they had these characters talk. Then you throw in some of the most cringeworthy one-liners from Statham and some of the other actors, and it only fails even more.

Meg 2 was also almost two hours long, which was really 30-40 minutes too long. The first half was just boring and dragged along with these uninspiring and uninteresting characters that we have no connection with in a plot that had to do with illegal underwater mining instead of Meg fighting.

Then, if you saw the trailers for Meg 2, you have seen absolutely every minute of any scene with the shark that could be considered cool, even a little bit.

I did laugh several times, but I was laughing at the movie and not with the movie. There was no humor in the flick… at least, intentional humor.

As I was coming out of the theater, I heard a young boy, probably around 9 or 10, say that this was his favorite movie of the summer. I believe that because that is about the level that Meg 2: The Trench is fishing for.

0.75 stars