[Meg 2: The Trench is currently playing in cinemas worldwide.]

H

oly megalodon! Just when you thought it was safe to give this floundering franchise a wide berth, along swims Meg 2: The Trench: a follow-up so bloated, so utterly and defiantly absurd, it would be remiss of me not to recognise its chowderheaded charms. Snatching the reins from Jon Turteltaub, whose po-faced 2018 original failed to capitalise upon the nightmarish pulp of its literary origin, British director Ben Wheatley—yes, he of Kill List and Sightseers fame; a move that feels more like some tardy April Fool than a genuine act of studio temerity—manages to wring just the right tone from a mega-budgeted monster pic that has zero desire of being anything but a beast of a good time.

Stuffed to the gills with technological codswallop and a prosaic story arc about greedy corporate villains, there are times during the first third of The Trench—its sharks-in-captivity-for-the-sake-of-science spiel a neutered riff on, well, we all know what—when it feels as if Wheatley and co. might’ve abandoned ship altogether, as a returning Jason Statham (habitually blasé) is saddled with trotting out the same leaden reams of exposition that made the first Meg such a bore. (An illogical traipse along the bottom of the Mariana Trench—miles below sea level, where the interchangeable cast of cardboard cut-outs find themselves stuck—does inject a bit of skittish, otherworldly panic in the vein of recent Kristen Stewart vehicle Underwater.) And then, as if by magic, there it is: that one crumb of dialogue—decorated with sparkling derision by actor-cum-rapper Page Kennedy, pistol glued to palm while fleeing some ambiguously foreign baddies—that turns this fatuous kettle of fish into a briny chunk of gold-encrusted cheese: “I even made poison-tipped bullets . . . just like in Jaws 2!”

Okay, so it’s hardly Shakespeare (or even Benchley), but it is the first indication that this sequel’s in on the joke; the type of ebullient, popcorn-spitting nanosecond that can plunge an entire auditorium into chaos. The ensuing mayhem—though never quite as immersive as it should be; Wheatley frames so much of it from afar—comes thick and fast, the action budging to an idyllic tourist spot (the mischievously christened Fun Island) that gives the overblown finale room to let rip with a mélange of deep-sea devilry. Because why stop at 70ft prehistoric man-eaters when you can throw in giant octopi, hordes of dino-lizard thingies, and a throng of halfwit tourists who, oblivious to the wholesale bloodbath occurring around them, insist on staying . . . where else?! . . . in the water. I believe they call it summertime madness.