Meg 2: The Trench is part of a rich Hollywood tradition – trashy sequels that nobody asked for

The sequel to 2018’s killer shark blockbuster ‘The Meg’ is out in cinemas and has been eaten alive by critics. Geoffrey Macnab looks at the industry’s storied history of sequel schlock – and wonders whether reviewers may have been missing the joke

Hello, old chum: Jason Statham in ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ (Warner Bros)

The mayhem starts in the very first sequence of Meg 2: The Trench. We are whisked back to the “cretaceous period”, some 65 million years ago. Ferocious dinosaurs, looking as if they’re on leave from some 1950s Ray Harryhausen B-movie, are roaming the earth. But they’re no match for the giant sharks known as “megalodons”, which eat up T rexes as if they’re munching on Twiglets.

British director Ben Wheatley (of Kill List and High-Rise fame) is already basking in some of the worst reviews of his career for the film, which surfaced in UK cinemas on Friday. Critics had been kept away from it until the last minute. The distributors clearly wanted to stop them getting their teeth into a movie that even its star, Jason Statham, has acknowledged is primarily a money-making exercise. In their early write-ups, the press skewered the movie as “plain awful”, “a tedious, repetitive joke” and railed against its “monster-sized silliness” and “mindless carnage”.

Strangely, these attacks on the film are probably what distributor Warner Bros will have been anticipating. Meg 2 fits into a long and sometimes inglorious tradition of the ludicrous sequel. This is a film made not out of any artistic impulse or desire to go deeper into its characters. It has come into existence because the original film grossed over $500m worldwide (doing especially well in China). US studios executives hate to “leave money on the table”, as they put it. Not producing a second Meg would have risked missing out on a potential windfall.