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

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.

But while the reviews may be atrocious, The Meg 2 is still – whisper it gently – quite fun. Wheatley and his screenwriters are in on the joke. They’ll have their protagonists, at the most fraught moments, suddenly shout out lines like: “This is some dumbass s***, mark my words!”. Or, even more bizarrely, start discussing the poison tip bullets that were used in Jaws 2.

Some scenes here, among them the opening sequence with the dinosaurs, or the late set-piece in which Staham ends up with his feet wedging open a shark’s mouth, are deliberately clunky and ridiculous. Others show off Hollywood VFX and stunt work at its best. The more tourists on “Fun Island” the sharks devour, the more deadpan and rugged Staham’s performance as the harpoon-wielding hero Jonas becomes. Appropriately, this is being marketed as summer movie par excellence, the type of film best seen in a state of mild intoxication and with a tub of popcorn on your lap.

In an era of franchise filmmaking, sequels are now more commonplace than ever before. There’s an obvious difference, though, between a massively hyped, bigger-budgeted new Marvel or DC sequel and opportunistic follow-up films like Meg 2 – something thrown together simply because the original was a surprise hit. Audiences are often deeply suspicious about those.

Take 2006’s Basic Instinct 2, the long-in-the-works follow-up to the 1992 Paul Verhoeven erotic thriller. The new picture still had the same star, Sharon Stone, as the highly sexed pulp novelist Catherine Tramell, but neither her presence, nor that of David Morrissey as her psychoanalyst, stopped it from turning into a box-office disaster. Fans stayed away, convinced that the producers were selling them a pup. Ironically, several critics preferred the second film. “Funny, clever and hilarious,” proclaimed highbrow BFI magazine Sight & Sound, which described it as “a ludicrously entertaining addition to the ‘shrinks and shagging’ genre”.

The influential US writer Roger Ebert gave it a one-and-a-half star rating but confided to his readers that he felt the film “throbbed with a horrible fascination”. Reviewing it, he ended up as contorted as Stone in any of the film’s bedroom scenes. He concluded that the picture wasn’t “good in any rational or defensible way”, nor was it bad in “rational and indefensible ways”. That was probably his way of saying that he enjoyed it but didn’t want to admit the fact. A guilty pleasure, then.

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1990), James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) and Chris Columbus’ Home Alone 2 (1992) and other exceptions notwithstanding, traditional sequels have almost always been far weaker than their predecessors. Often, they will have been recast or made on a slightly smaller budget, or will simply seem like crude imitations of the original films. Their cultural moment will have passed. Without the original stars, they will seem like pale facsimiles.

Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) may have reunited director John Landis and actor Dan Ackroyd, but it lacked the main ingredient that had galvanised the original Blues Brothers 20 years earlier, namely John Belushi. The hell-raising star had died in 1982, and without him the abrasiveness and energy simply wasn’t there.

Sometimes there is such a gap between the first film and the follow-up that the public will be nonplussed. That was the case with Robin Hardy’s horror picture The Wicker Tree (2011), which finally emerged almost 40 years after the same director’s classic The Wicker Man (1973). The project was dogged with financial problems and received only a small-scale cinema release. “Its quaintly old-fashioned mixture of Carry On-style double entendre, mild eroticism and campy horror is sure to disappoint fans who have waited long and patiently for a new Hardy film,” lamented Screen International upon release.

Sequels to The Exorcist have also had a very patchy history. When John Boorman, the much-respected director of Point Blank (1967) and Deliverance (1972) took on Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), he was pilloried. Horror fans are still writing articles today on why Boorman’s folly “is a masterclass in all the ways a horror sequel can fly off the rails”. Critics queued up to drive a stake into the picture. The New York Times called it a “desperate concoction” and ridiculed its young star Linda Blair. “A rather costly load of old nonsense,” the Financial Times declared – it was about as kind as anybody got. Boorman’s sin was to have meddled too much with the elements that made William Freidkin’s The Exorcist (1973) such a classic.

However, certain other sequels are so close to the original films that spawned them that they seem like near clones. Fading British star Joan Collins revived her career by appearing as Fontaine Khaled in softcore porn picture The Stud (1978), based on a novel by her sister Jackie, and quickly followed it up with The Bitch (1979). Both films offered a near-identical mix of glamour, disco music and simulated sex.

Sometimes, sequels look to rip-off and parody the original films that gave birth to them. Among the stranger examples of this trend are Look What Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976), a TV movie that shamelessly exploited the 1968 Roman Polanski feature Rosemary’s Baby, throwing in pop and psychedelic elements. Bizarrely, Rosemary’s son, whose father is the devil, grows up to be a prog rocker.

The first Meg movie was tongue in cheek, anyway. The second is, therefore, a spoof of a spoof – and that means moving onto quicksand in filmic terms. British director Wheatley combines full-blown horror (characters’ heads are bitten and blown off), outrageous kitsch and scenes you’d expect to find in a family comedy. He is in a cinematic realm very far removed from the dystopian surrealism of his JG Ballard adaptation High-Rise (2015), or the dark intensity of his English civil war drama, A Field in England (2013), or even his recent Netflix version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (2020).

The Meg 2 is fairground filmmaking. It has smirking human villains, plenty of bloodshed, an illogical plot and absurd scenes of Statham taking on several gigantic sharks at once as he rides across the sea on a souped-up water buggy. It pushes the idea of “the ludicrous follow-up” to new extremes. Whether cinemagoers will see the joke remains to be seen. Critics clearly haven’t. What is already apparent is that none of the havoc wreaked by the “Megs” on screen comes close to matching the viciousness of those early reviews. This, then, seems like a sequel too far. It will be a major surprise if those giant, all-devouring sharks come back for thirds.

‘Meg 2: The Trench’ is in cinemas