Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Meg 2: The Trench arrives as the second course in a franchise built on a simple proposition: large prehistoric shark, larger box office. The ensemble is genuinely international, drawing on Chinese, British, American and Pacific talent, though the arrangement owes less to a casting philosophy than to the financing structure behind it. A Chinese co-production needs Chinese stars. A global release needs global faces. The result is diversity as logistics, not as statement, and the film seems content with that arrangement.

The villains are a corrupt billionaire and an illegal deep-sea mining operation, which lends the proceedings a faint whiff of class resentment. Do not mistake it for a critique. Driscoll exists to be eaten. The mercenaries exist to be eaten. The mining exists to rupture the trench and release the monsters, which is the only function the film requires of an environmental crisis. Greed is punished because greed makes a convenient antagonist, not because anyone involved wishes to reorganize the economy.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. The women in this film are a dead wife remembered fondly, a billionaire who gets devoured, a traitor who gets devoured, and a security officer with perhaps four lines. No romantic subplot distracts from the sharks. No character pauses to educate the audience about anything at all. There is no queer subtext, no neurodivergent arc, no body-positive messaging, no reckoning with history, and no lecture waiting at the end of the tunnel. The film is a hundred and nineteen minutes of letting a very large fish eat people, and for that we should be grateful.