Over the past five years I have seen The Meg a few times, and my rating for it has risen from two stars to a solid two-and-a-half.  It still isn’t a good film, but it is more enjoyable and exciting than I had originally thought.  It even has a few frightening moments, which I think should have been the point.  It’s a movie about a gigantic, prehistoric shark, after all, and what could be scarier than that?  Well, sadly, the producers discarded most of the genuinely frightening Steve Alten novel and turned in the modern direction of horror-comedy.  It almost works.  But then they went further in that direction with the sequel, and the result is a shark movie without any bite.

Ben Wheatley’s sequel finds Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) part of a scientific team exploring the deep Trench where the Megalodons live, only to find something completely unexpected.  A long underwater sequence (reminiscent of 2020’s Underwater) reveals the real menace of the movie, before the story resurfaces and we revert to a replay of the beach resort climax of the first film, replete with the very same honeymooning tourists and their dog.

I must admit that I did not expect the first half of the story to travel where it did, and there’s some cool stuff along the way at which to gawk, from Megalodons and other giant underwater species to the marvelous-looking scientific facility made to explore the briny deep.  But then the story falters and even a few familiar faces from the first film (Page Kennedy, Sophia Cai and Cliff Curtis) cannot help save it from smelling like day-old herring left out in the sun.  The blame falls firmly on the producers and writers, who have chosen to emphasize comic quips and bantering byplay rather than the dramatic situation that these flippant characters have to survive.  And that’s a shame.

Shark movies can and should be terrifying.  I’ve lost sleep because of Jaws and its ilk, and the very idea of Megalodons roaming the oceans, eating boatloads of people at one bite should keep me awake for a week.  But no.  My biggest gripe about the first film is doubled here: no one in the story actually acts as if encountering, let alone surviving, meetings with a Megalodon would scar them for life.  It’s no big deal to these people, let them toss off another quip and jet ski around all the giant gnashing teeth.  It’s absurd.  This isn’t supposed to be a fun ride; it’s supposed to be a journey to the jaws of Hell and back again for a lucky few, who, like the gobsmacked viewers who haven’t covered their eyes in fear, have lived to see the sun again.  That’s the movie that I should be watching.  This isn’t it.  ☆ ☆.  31 August 2023.