Meg 2: The Trench drowns in oversized shark-movie silliness

polygon.com:

Sharks aren’t the only animals with horror movie cred. But while creature features have tackled almost every commonly known animal under the sun (or sea, or elsewhere), there’s not, say, a big-studio killer-snake movie every two or three years.

It’s still striking that sharks — easy to demonize because of their dead-looking eyes and supposed relentlessness, and because of the enduring popularity of Jaws and TV’s Shark Week — have inspired such a range of horrors, from stripped-down and intimate (The Shallows) to downright grim (Open Water) and back to SyFy-level chintz. The latter is the dangerous water that Meg 2: The Trench winds up occupying, risking self-annihilation for the sake of sometimes self-conscious silliness.

Though 2018’s The Meg was a long-gestating adaptation of a Jaws-ish novel, it didn’t bear much resemblance to the all-time shark movie champion. Meg 2 swims further away; it may be the first big-budget shark movie to so thoroughly rip offDeep Blue Sea, itself a champion of Jaws ripoffs. With its broader menagerie of killer sea creatures, Meg 2 also owes a debt to Steven Spielberg’s other megahit creature feature, Jurassic Park (or, more accurately, the goofier moments of its Jurassic World sequels). What the series lacks, compared to its unofficial source material, is horror movie nerve: The first movie could barely muster the fortitude to let its gigantic prehistoric sharks actually consume any delicious humans.

Meg 2 remains a PG-13 affair, even with director Ben Wheatley, best known for violent thrillers and dark comedies, stepping in for the guy who made Phenomenon. The new film rejoins Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), now using his seafaring brawn to fight environmental crimes at the behest of the