Every year Hollywood releases a silly blockbuster that wants nothing more than to entertain us.  Two years ago it was Venom: There Will Be Carnage.  Last year brought Jurassic World: Dominion.  This year’s model is Meg 2: The Trench, a movie that figures the best way to keep the audience amused is not by being just a Jaws rip-off, like its predecessor, but by ripping off as many movies as possible within its two hour runtime.  Never fear, the Jaws elements are still there.  However, they are left in the dust in this movie’s quest to become the buffet dinner version of action movies.  Case in point: the opening scene, where a prehistoric monster eats a prehistoric monster until our friend the Megaladon arrives.  I half expected to see Adam Driver’s ship land in the background.  (For those unaware, that’s a 65 reference.)

The first movie insisted Jason Stratham’s Jonas Taylor was a world-class diver without ever explaining why or showing why.  Meg 2, however, remembers that Stratham made his bones by kicking ass and taking names and immediately gives him a scene where he can do his standard  punch-kick thing.  After being caught photographing some Eastern-European bad-guys dumping toxic waste, Jonas parkours his way across the boat until returning cast member Mac (Cliff Curtis) can scoop him up with his seaplane.  How Jonas transformed into an eco-warrior is never explained, but like a lot of things in this movie it makes you feel good inside so long as you stop asking questions.

Jonas isn’t content with protecting the fishes in the sea, however.  He’s a father-figure to  Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai) whose mother Suyin (Bingbing Li) died sometime after marrying Jonas but before this movie.  She’s honored at a black tie party given on the Mana One sea exploration platform, but nobody ever mentions how she died.  I kept thinking that her death must have been so gruesome that nobody can bear to talk about it.  Either that or it was run-of-the-mill illness, and there’s no reason to make the audience feel depressed with those details.  All we need to know is that Jonas is looking after Meiying, an impetuous teenager who–like all movie teenagers–will get herself into trouble as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

In Suyin’s place the movie introduces Meiying’s Uncle Jiuming (Jing Wu), a character who was not mentioned in the original movie.  (I watched it days before seeing this movie.  Five years is a long time between sequels.)  Jiuming acquired his father’s company and with the help of billionaire financier Hillary Driscoll (Sienna Guillory) and has carried on the family tradition of exploring The Trench.  Jiuming has “raised” a captive baby Meg named Haiqi and insists he can control it by way of a sonic clicking device, which is a cute notion to have when you’re staring down a supersized shark who can devour you in a flash.

If the Alien movies have taught me anything, it’s that bad outcomes invariably happen when corporations fund scientific research.  Naturally, the story reveals that Hillary has bad designs on The Trench.  The forthcoming mission involves Jonas and a rainbow coalition of handsome young people diving through the thermocline (a.k.a. super-cold cloud) to the ocean floor.  Once there, they slip into diving suits that enable them to walk around and admire the brightly colorful plants and fish.  (Science!)  To everyone’s surprise, Haiqi broke free of his holding tank and has followed them into The Trench to take part in a Meg mating.  In a rare instance of restraint, the movie does not show us Meg’s mating.

To get the plot moving, a series of explosions reveals an illegal mining operation nearby.  (Hiding anything on the ocean floor is not easy, but that doesn’t mean you don’t at least try.)  The operation is led by a sweaty Latino bad guy named Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) who, unsurprisingly, works for Driscoll.  Montes nonchalantly blows up a ship with his own colleagues because he was given orders that the operation “can’t be discovered”.  (It’s listed right there in the operations manual, in the section titled “What To Do When Discovered”.)  That explosion damages the ships with the good guys, forcing Jonas and the rest to walk over a kilometer to the base with Montes in it.  As you may have guessed, a bunch of the youngsters don’t make it, including quirky couple Curtis (Whoopie Van Raam) and Lane (Felix Mayr).  Alas, they were fun while they lasted.  This sequence is a rip-off of one of the main action sequences of the Kristen Stewart movie Underwater, itself a rip-off of The Meg.  I’m all for recycling but this is ridiculous.

Once they’re safely inside the illegal mining operation, Jonas has a fistfight with Montes that naturally involves a conveyor belt and a rock crusher.  Then, after giving Montes the slip, and with escape pods in reach, a traitor is revealed.  While Mac and DJ (Page Kennedy) battle Montes and the traitor from above, Jonas finally shows us why he is such a renowned diver in the depths below.  After our heroes reach the surface, the movie reveals just how crazy it wants to be, and oh boy is it ever.

In a nod to the first movie, there is a beach full of vacationing Asians, especially women in bikinis.  In no short order, the movie will bring together: a school of Megs, a gigantic octopus, jungle commandos, dinosaurs and yes, Montes.  Throughout the ensuing chaos, our heroes will outrun fireballs, commandeer helicopters, search for a working cell phone, shoot guns while diving through the air and narrowly avoid being chomped.  When order has finally been restored, our heroes gather to toast those who have been eaten.

If you haven’t guessed by now, Meg 2 is completely and undeniably shameless in what it will do to entertain the audience.  If the template for The Meg was Jurassic Park, then Meg 2 is Jurassic World.  Not content with being a dinosaur movie with a handsome and likable cast and decent special effects, this sequel is bigger, louder and sillier than its predecessor by a factor of ten.  Unlike the first movie, which was admirable in how everyone involved maintained a straight face despite its ludicrous premise, this sequel has giddily abandoned plausibility in favor of zany monster movie antics and action movie cliches.  Additionally, given how each act is crazier than the one that preceded it, I wondered if the screenplay was written as a dare.  What other reason could there be for the utterly bananas free-for-all that is the third act, where our hero confronts giant sharks on a jet skip armed with explosive spears?

As before, Statham is good as Jonas and makes for a credible action movie hero.  I commend him for resisting the urge to wink at the audience many times over.  He’s a pro who understands the sort of movie he’s in and commits fully.  Director Ben Wheatley keeps the action moving at a brisk pace throughout, allowing the story to become the roller coaster ride it clearly wants to be.  Jing Wu and Cliff Curtis make for a funny pairing, and Page Kennedy gets all the funny lines as before.  On the negative side, Guillory’s villain isn’t as interesting and pales in comparison to Riann Wilson’s Morris from the first movie.  (I half expected him to return, Jonah style, from the belly of a Meg.)  Also, casting Peris-Mencheta as the villain felt regressive because he is so reminiscent of the villains that would relentlessly pursue Schwarzenegger or Stallone in the Eighties.  Otherwise, Meg 2 is a very funny and well-made circus act.  As the credits rolled, I smiled when I realized that the filmmakers choice of a closing song, the Ting Ting’s “That’s Not My Name”, is the logical successor to Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey” from the first movie.  Say what you want, but the people behind this movie have thought of everything.  Recommended.